All the unfinished work begins to come together as a coherent whole, at some point. Concepts join, ideas merge, good parts stay and not so good parts fall off. Everything you've ever started is leading up to something. It'll come. You can't see it yet because it's something new. Something magnificent. Something worth all that effort. And when it does come, you will know. You will feel. And you will regret nothing.

Having an economics education, I like to think of this in simple economic terms: Everything has a production process, and during that process the unfinished goods are generally useless, or at least far less useful than the finished product. Economic development is, in some sense, the steady expansion of the scope and scale of production processes that society can engage in. I think the complexity of the modern economy along with globalization have drawn out the “production process” for building highly useful human beings as well. In any case, I guess my main point is that you have no idea how valuable your unique mix of skills will be until it is “complete”, and that may take decades, but the payoff for building that skill set can be orders of magnitude larger than a “normal” path.

Wow, that's fantastic, and so true.

Thanks for this.