Share Your Gifts

I love starting projects but I’m not always the best at finishing them. 

I’m constantly surrounded by projects in various states of incompletion and instead of focusing on finishing one of them, I just keep starting new projects.

This creates the illusion that I’m making real progress but I know it’s just a fancy procrastination mechanism — my brain trying to keep me safe by not sharing things that are very personal to me for fear that people might not like them, and to shelter me from my own disappointment in what I’ve created not living up to what it was supposed to be.

For my fellow serial project starters, I want to offer a few reasons to finish one of those projects, to take something to Z, to share your gifts. 

Here we go:

When we share our gifts with others, we learn more about ourselves. 

Coming up with ideas is pretty fucking easy. Taking an abstract idea and making it exist within the boundaries of reality is hard. You’ve got to tweak it, bend it, and maybe even bend reality a little bit. This is where you really put your fingerprint on your ideas. The process of taking something all the way will help you uncover gifts you never knew you had and understand your idea on a deeper level. Ever notice how after you teach something to someone else, you often understand it better yourself? This is the same effect. 

Sharing our gifts builds bridges of connection. 

Sharing our gifts is like sending out a flare or flying a flag. “This is what I believe!” It is, in essence, revealing who we are. It can be scary but if we never reveal who we are, we’re depriving ourselves of the connection that comes with finding other people who believe what we believe. Stepping into your truth deepens existing connections, plants the seeds for future connections, and weeds the garden of imposters — people and things disguised as true connections that only suck your energy and muffle your voice. 

Sharing our gifts inspires other people to share theirs. 

Sometimes people need to be inspired by someone that they can relate to. Someone who has been where they’ve been. Someone on their level. While the Steve Jobs of the world are often used as the gold standard for what creators and entrepreneurs should be, they are few and far between, and modeling them is toxic. There are people all around you with ideas brewing inside them just waiting to be inspired by someone like you. People can’t be inspired by your gifts if you never share them. 

I’m not saying you have to share everything — some things are sacred and just for you. I'm just saying you have something unique inside you that can make the world a better place, but only if you let it out.