I usually like to finish the things I start. But my behavior over the years reflected otherwise.
My mother always told me my work was half-assed up to a certain age. And when I got to that point I did my job well enough, but my personal areas started to suffer. My room would get mostly clean with a few last steps left undone, bleeding into the week. I'd go weeks without remembering to wash clothes.
I remember when I got the responsibility to wash my gym clothes and didn't do it for weeks. My uniform was horrific. It smelled like absolute ass. I still put it on. I got called out in class and had to change. Luckily there wasn't any physical activity that day, so everything was okay. But that was a real moment.
That extended to schoolwork. Starting a lot. Never getting it done by the deadline. Doing all the work at the very last minute in hopes of raising my grade and acting like I cared.
I guess you could say I never really had solid priorities. My go-with-the-flow mindset hindered me because I had no flow. I was just floating with the tide, unaware I'd been lost at sea for a while.
So many ideas of what life would be like. The places I'd go. The dreams I'd dream. The sights and people to meet. I spent the later years of high school daydreaming about what it would be like to go out on my own. This is coming from a homebody, mostly. Didn't really go many places. Mostly just school and home to play some games.
I just wasn't taught much about the actual doing-life part. Always given the advice about going to school and all that, but not given a thorough talk about how to pick where to live, how to really save money, how to pay taxes, how to run a business and participate in other life events. Not blaming anybody. I just jumped into life headfirst.
Had like a grace period for a year after high school to try to figure something out. Got a job. And was still building my idea.
The pattern wasn't just life. It showed up in the places I thought I had control.
June 4, 2020. I bought Minecraft.
The world I made originally was corrupted. My friend started a new one a day or two later. That became the six-year world.
We didn't go that far. Maybe a thousand-block circle around spawn. Couldn't find a decent spot until we came across a big mountain. That became the base.
The first project I truly forgot was the iron farm. Started it. Never finished it. Just walked away.
Then there was my room. I dug a long staircase into the mountain. My room was behind the staircase, and I wanted a hidden entrance. A contraption. But I couldn't figure out the redstone. The idea got dragged out, left alone, and eventually I tore down the scaffolding. My friend built his room just fine.
In the meantime I built a villager breeder. That project got finished. It broke, and we had to rebuild it, but it got done. I built a giant farm. One of the prettiest things we had. We found a zombie spawner and built a farm around it with a designed room. That one worked. Then we found four more spawners close by. Those went straight to the graveyard of things to do.
An outer shell for the house got built. A storage room got built but never stayed organized. We had a horse stable we never really got into. A mob farm that never worked and just sat there. And the villagers. So much time spent on villagers without knowing what we were doing. Nobody told us to keep villages 150 blocks apart. We had one huge messed up village. A breeder that finally worked and sent villagers to a giant glass box we called the terrarium. Villagers standing around in there waiting for the trading hall. We had ten to fifteen good trades, but only books. No weapons. No armor. I wanted discounts. I wanted more. Setback deaths. Sessions that ended before things got fixed. Things that never got fixed.
Everything else was an idea. A whole town. Houses and shops dotted around. A large grass wall around the base. Huge builds towering high. All of it mine. My friend helped, but he was mostly an enjoyer of spoils. I was the hands-on technical player. The architecture, the styles, the random builds. All me. But his room was pretty cool. And he built the terrarium cage. I built the houses inside it.
People visited our world. My friend brought at least two people through. Two additional friends joined at different times and left soon after. My siblings saw it. The world was worth showing off.
The villager trader never came online.
Six years. And the one thing that would've made the whole world easy never got finished.
My friend tried to upload the world to a realm. First night, his wifi had issues. Next day after work, no luck. Three more days of attempts.
I went to check the realm. The world still wasn't there. I called my friend. He told me it never went through. After all those attempts. Six years. And it couldn't leave the device.
Same pattern. Different place. Half-finished room. Half-finished world. I wasn't building toward anything. I was just filling time.
When I started working my job, after some time, it clicked. I could be wherever, whenever, given I had the means to be there and the money to support it. That was freeing. And terrifying.
I immediately began to contemplate life without support. Right now I could probably survive on my own, but I haven't been. I have a place to stay and food to eat and electricity to use. If I went out on my own, I could make it, but I'd probably be at break-even given how hard it is to survive out there.
That's why Project Fishtank became my solution. It's a way I can compound income and opportunity exponentially over time and hopefully get enough to live a comfortable life.
But it wasn't just about escaping the room I'd shut myself in for years. It became less about escape and more about what I could actually live for. The things that make life enjoyable, bearable, worth it. How to separate healthily instead of just getting away. Learning what it means to keep in touch and talk to family semi-regularly.
I'm not much of a social person. I can be expressive, but at the end of the day I'm not eager to gain tons of friends. I enjoy my personal connections, but my circle is small.
That's when finishing started to matter. Not because finishing is virtuous. Because every unfinished thing was another escape route. Another way to avoid committing to the one thing that actually matters.
I set a rule for the new Minecraft world. Every project that gets started gets finished before a new one begins. I can't multitask until I've proven I can handle a single task.
The rule wasn't about Minecraft. It was about everything. The filter that lives between having an idea and committing to it.
When the filter works, you say no to almost everything. You assess the time and energy you actually have. You ask whether this project is worth the slot it'll occupy for weeks or months. You start only what fits. And because you start only what fits, you finish what you start.
When the filter is broken, every idea becomes a project. A game looks fun, so you install it. An idea feels exciting, so you chase it. A new direction seems promising, so you pivot. The filter never stops anything at the door. Everything gets in. Nothing gets finished.
The result looks like a finishing problem. But the damage happened upstream. In the split-second between having the idea and saying yes to it.
I applied the filter to my life. The backlog audit. Listing everything. Sorting it. Removing what couldn't run while the main thing was stuck.
Almost everything got uninstalled or postponed. The games. The training. The travel. The shows. Everything except Project Fishtank.
The audit gave me clarity. It named what was happening. The broken filter didn't just cost me time or PlayStation space. It cost me direction. The whole project almost didn't happen because the filter let everything in and nothing got the focus it needed.
What a working filter unlocks isn't productivity. It's a life. The small circle. The family I keep in touch with. The stories and experiences. The compounding. The slow burn.
I stopped daydreaming about escape and started building a life worth living. I want to flip the script and help those who helped me get into a favorable position.
And then the grind gets really good.
I write about this every two weeks in Project Fishtank — the split-second between knowing and doing, the filter, the backlog audit, finishing what you start. If this landed, you can read more 🔗 here
-Fish
