Ep 120: The Beauty of Completing
Why Completion Is Your Most Undervalued Creative Superpower
SUMMARY
When you actually finish something—really, truly complete it—your brain rewards you with a hit of dopamine that doesn't just feel good. It literally rewires your brain to want to finish the next thing too. Yet most creative professionals are sitting on project management systems filled with work that's 80-85% complete, creating a constant mental drain that's quietly sabotaging their confidence and business growth. According to research by Dr. Michael Frank from Brown University, your brain's reward system is more activated by achievement than by starting new work, but most creatives never tap into this powerful system because we're trained to see endless possibilities for improvement. The biggest barrier is confusing completion with perfection—completion means the work serves its intended purpose, while perfection keeps you in an endless revision cycle that prevents you from ever crossing the finish line.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
⚡️ Key Takeaway 1: Create completion rituals and celebrations. You repeat what gets celebrated, and celebration reinforces the neural pathways of finishing.
⚡️ Key Takeaway 2: Define "done" before you start. Paint a vivid picture of what completion looks like using all your senses—what it will look, feel, sound, and even taste like when finished.
⚡️ Key Takeaway 3: Implement a two-week completion sprint. Focus solely on taking existing projects across the finish line without starting anything new or making major revisions.
NOTABLE QUOTES
💬 Notable Quote: "Completion is not about perfection. It's about purpose, and when your work serves its intended purpose, you're done."
💬 Notable Quote: "Creative professionals who experience the most growth and satisfaction are those who have mastered the art of completing."
💬 Notable Quote: "Don't let the pursuit of perfection rob you of the beauty of completing."
EPISODE RESOURCES
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TRANSCRIPT
Welcome back to Creativity Made Easy, the podcast for professional creatives who want to scale their business with systems and processes that actually work. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, creative process coach and consultant, and I help creative professionals know themselves, their process and their teams so that they can move from chaos to clarity. Whether you're a solo creative feeling overwhelmed by endless projects or leading a team that struggles to get things across the finish line, this show will give you the tools to create with efficiency as you scale together.
If you're new here, make sure to grab my free resource library at dustinpead.com slash free. You'll find all of the frameworks, templates, methods and tools to help you optimize your creative process. Absolutely free. Go to dustinpead.com slash free to download. You can also follow me online for daily tips and advice at dustinpead.com, Instagram, LinkedIn, all those types of things.
I want you to imagine this for a second with me. You're looking at your project management system, whether it's Asana or a whiteboard, a notebook, post-its, doesn't matter. And you see a familiar pattern start to come up. Project after project is sitting right around that 80, 85% completion mark. The website just needs one final review, the brand identity that's missing the style guide, the campaign waiting for final documentation. It's all good work and all almost done. All stuck.
Now picture the feeling when you look at that board. There's this low level anxiety isn't there? There's a mental weight of all of these things that you need to finish. You might even find yourself avoiding opening that project management system because seeing all of those incomplete tasks feels really overwhelming.
But here's what's fascinating. Imagine that if instead of starting something new, you spent the next two weeks just finishing those 80% complete projects, not perfecting them, not adding new features, just crossing them off as done. I've seen this transformation happen over and over again and there's something almost magical about what happens next. That energy shift, that momentum, that confidence that comes from actually finishing what you start. That's the beauty of completing we're going to explore today.
Now listen, I'm no brain doctor or psychologist or anything like that, but I have studied these mental trends when it comes to completing work for creatives. Your brain is literally wired to reward completion, but most creatives never tap into this powerful system. There's a dopamine cycle. Dopamine is the chemical released throughout your brain and your body that's associated with task completion. And it's more powerful than the dopamine hit of starting something new. Let that sink in for a second. That finishing something is more powerful to your brain than starting something new.
According to research published in Science Magazine back in 2020 by Dr. Michael Frank from Brown University and colleagues, dopamine release from task completion creates a reinforcement loop that motivates continued effort with the brain's reward system being more activated by achievement than by the anticipation of starting new work.
So this begs us to kind of compare. Let's compare starting versus completing and I will just say this right off the gate. I love most, I really love all of Jon Acuff's books, J-O-N-A-C-U-F-F. And he has two very distinct books. One book is called Start and the other one is called Finish. And I recommend all creatives read them both. But today we're gonna focus on the finishing side.
So let's talk about starting versus completing. Starting gives you a small hit of dopamine but completion gives you a lasting pathway in the neurological science. Each completion makes the next completion easier neurologically, just like doing reps at the gym. Each rep makes the next rep easier. Incomplete tasks create open loops that drain your cognitive energy. Open loops drain your cognitive energy because you're constantly having to think about what needs to happen in order to get this done, checked off, completed and out of my life and it weighs on you. It weighs on your mind, it weighs on your emotions and it can ultimately weigh on you physically as well.
Creatives often struggle with completion more than any other profession because we're trained to see the endless possibilities for improvement, right? That's why we're called in. That's why people pick up the phone and call the creatives. They want endless possibilities. They want to explore something new. They need to think creatively. Creative work doesn't have natural stopping points like other types of work. We have to understand when done is done. Also there's a fear that completion means that we can't make it better. Hey, it's out there now, it's done and we can't make it better. But what you need to understand is that next time you can make it better and there's always a next time.
I want to talk about the difference between completion versus perfection because a lot of creators that I run into, the reason they struggle with completion is because they're after the elusive perfection. And completion just means that the work serves its intended purpose. That's it. Whatever it was at the very beginning. And we always talk about on this show, we talk about clear priorities and objectives and scope from the very beginning. What is it that what's the problem that we're trying to solve here? Completion means that we just solved the problem. We saw we did what the project was intended to do. Where on the flip side, perfection is the enemy of completion because we're constantly seeking something that cannot be obtained. Perfection cannot be obtained no matter what we do. And so we're constantly trying and trying more and more and more and we're never taking it to completion because perfection is never there.
So I want to talk about there's some hidden costs that comes with not completing things with incompletion. Every unfinished project is quietly sabotaging your creative confidence and business growth. And here's why. There's a psychological weight that comes from incomplete work. Unfinished projects create mental background noise. It's constant, you need to finish, you need to finish. There's no closed loop. And so it's constant mental background noise, which is causing psychological weight. There's constantly remembering what needs to be finished will drain your energy. Starting new feels easier than facing incomplete projects and then Jon Acuff will talk about that in his book Start as well. It feels exciting. It's new. It's fresh. It's a brand new adventure. It's a whole new it's a blank canvas, right? All these wonderful things like springtime brings to us. But the real work happens in the winter when we complete things and things come to an end and a rest.
So let's recognize the patterns that often plague us as creatives here when it comes to completing things. Incomplete work delays payment and cash flow. And that's what we're all after, right? We're all out here trying to earn a living with our creative work, whether it's within an organization as a part of a creative team, whether it's a full on agency that we're a part of or that we own, whatever it is, incomplete work doesn't get paid. Simple as that. Consistently delivering work that feels almost done can also cost you your reputation or your brand.
If you're like, yeah, I got this to the 80% mark and I just mailed in the rest because I really needed to check it off, right? That's not completion, right? That's giving up and good creators don't give up. They trade up, right? And completion creates scope creep because clients request constantly just one more thing. And if it feels incomplete, they're gonna ask for something. So complete the work, complete the work. You can complete the work and maybe you just need to tell yourself that today.
For your team and complete work from leadership creates team permission to not finish, right? So if it's constantly incomplete, it trickles down to the rest of your team. They go, look, our culture here is just to not finish things. And they might not say that out loud, but that's internally what they're going to get to the 80% mark. And they're going to say, okay, we got to 80%. It's close enough. What else we got? What else is new that we can start? Because they're looking for that lower dopamine hit and they're looking for, they're just out there repeating what they see from leadership. And it creates this frustrating cycle when team members can't move forward on dependent tasks, right? You or someone else on the team has said, hey, in order to get this completely done, we need sign off on it or we need this person to take it to the finish line, right? Or we need this person to get back with us with the right edit so that we can take it to the finish line. Provide your team with what they need because completion creates team momentum and confidence and that's what we're out here looking for.
There's research that was done by Dr. BJ Fogg at Stanford and it shows that completion behaviors once established create a cascade effect, a bit of a catalyst. People who complete small tasks are significantly more likely to complete larger, more complex tasks if you're a believer in Jesus like I am then you know that if you're faithful in little things You can be faithful in the big things and it's no different here that proverb reigns true for us each and every day and so don't focus on completing the larger ones if completing is hard for you or for your team pick three to five really small tasks this week and just focus on getting those small tasks done. Don't look at the large rock. Just look at the small pebble and conquer that one at a time. And the next thing you know, you'll be completing larger and larger tasks with a much less motivation and a much less energy effort.
All right, let's talk about what it takes to actually complete some things. Completion isn't just about willpower. It's about designing systems that make finishing feel inevitable. One thing I always like to do before we start anything, whether it's a client or an internal project, or even a project for myself. came up with the idea in the shower. I'm sitting on my desk and now it's time to kind of lay out the project, right? The very first thing I do, I take from Brené Brown and that is paint done before you start, right? Paint what done looks like before I ever start. Hey, when this thing is done, what does that look like? What does it feel like? What's the interaction look like? What does the feeling from my team going to have? What is the client going to think?
Think through all the senses, right? If it's something that you can taste, what's that gonna taste like? What's it gonna smell like? What's it gonna feel like? What's it gonna look like? What's it gonna sound like? Go through all those things and really paint a vivid picture of what done feels like before you start because creating that completion criteria at the project kickoff is of its most vital importance. it keeps you from, it keeps you resisting the urge at the end of the project to add just one more thing, right? Because there's one more things always come up.
So let me introduce you to this, what I call loosely the 85% rule for a creative work. Like I said earlier, most creative work is functionally complete at 85%. So we talked about the beginning of this podcast that a lot of your stuff is sitting at 80% done. Maybe it's already done. Maybe the last 15, 20% of the tasks that you have on there aren't super necessary or there's something that an admin can take care of, right? So send that off to them. So here's how you can identify that final 15% is actually worth the time investment. Do those tasks that are left sitting there, do they actually improve the project directly? Do they actually directly serve the project's core purpose and objective like we talked about? Does it actually finish painting done for you? Or is it just an extra little thing that's just gonna cause more work in the long run?
Will the client or the end user actually notice this change? If you're like, yeah, but I'll know it's there and they won't know it's there. That's not a good enough reason. Does the project move from functional to exceptional in a measurable way and a measurable way? Super important. If what you're going to do to take it across the finish line doesn't take it from just functional to exceptional and you can't measure it and it's not worth doing. And lastly, ask yourself, is this extra 10, 15, 20%? Is it addressing real feedback or is it just internal perfectionism starting to creep in?
Building completion rituals and celebrations matter as well. It's important to mark completion moments. You repeat what gets celebrated. So celebrate it. Celebration reinforces those neural pathways of finishing. So create team completion celebrations that build the culture that you want towards your goals. You want a culture of completion? Then celebrate when things get completed no matter how big or no matter how small. That's why if you use Asana like I do, I know many other project management softwares do the same, but when I check stuff off, you often get a flying unicorn that shoots across the screen. And there's something about a flying unicorn that just makes you feel like you did it and it's going up and to the right just like exponential growth, right? And it's very intentional from Asana, the people that put that in there because they know it's just a little celebration of you completing a small little task. It's going to reinforce you wanting to do it over and over again. So build those celebrations in with yourself and with your team.
We have to talk about this as well before we wrap up. have to break the endless revision cycle. It's so frustrating to me to talk to so many creatives who don't understand when enough is enough and they keep editing and keep editing and keep editing and keep editing. And look, I know we have some standards in our brain that are next to impossible to meet and we have some things. But can I just tell you that if you had five projects over the year and project one is only about as only ends up about 80% as good as what you originally hoped. I'm willing to bet you that project 2 is probably going to end up about 81 or 82% as good as you hoped. And then project number 3 might end up closer to 85% as good as you hoped. And so as you get closer and closer to project 5 and near the end of the year, you're going to get closer to what you actually wanted. And I know that's super frustrating, but you need to understand that completion, actually finishing those projects, will get you closer and closer to your ideal done.
Industry expert design thinking pioneer, Tim Brown from IDEO. He talks about this satisficing term, right? It's finding solutions that are good enough to meet the need rather than continuously and endlessly optimizing, right? This mindset shift is crucial for us creative professionals. You have to know when to be satisfied. So satisfying stops you from endlessly editing and reiterating over and over again. And I know we often like to blame the clients or the boss or whatever for the constant reiterations, but we're really the chief of all centers when it comes to this. We're really the ones that are going like, yeah, but I think I can make it better. Um, and there's a balance, I think too, I want to say this before we wrap up, there's a balance between giving up at the end and just checking it off and calling it done right. Because you just tired of looking at a task versus actually completing it where you have that complete satisfaction, the satisficing that Tim Brown talks about. So strive for that. I think that's what we need to do in our creative work this week.
So what now? Let's start experiencing this beauty of completing, right? So the first thing you should consider is some type of a review of your completion, right? What does the completion rate look like for you or your team or your department? Look at those projects that are currently in progress and start looking, marking the percentage of completion that each one is at. If there's anything sitting at 80% or higher, these are opportunities for you to get those quick wins. Take it across the finish line and celebrate when you do.
Number two, define done or paint done for the active projects. If you haven't painted done for them already, take a moment, pause, write two to three clear criteria that define what complete looks like. Right? What is the and then you ask yourself what is the project need to be accomplished and when will you know that it's done?
Third thing, implement a two week completion sprint. Hey, you know what? For the next two weeks, all we're going to do is take projects to the finish lines. No new projects, no major revisions, just finishing what's already great. We're going to take it across the finish line. And then once you do that, I want you to think about how are you going to celebrate? What is celebrating your you're done celebrating your completion look like for you, your team, your department, your agency, whatever. What does celebrating that look like? Everybody's unique. So think get creative. This is an opportunity for you to create something. You want to create something new. This is an opportunity to create something new, create a new celebration of what happens when you finished things off.
So check out Jon Acuff's books start and his book obviously finished. Don't forget to grab any free resources from my free resource library at dustinpead.com slash free. I've got a couple new things that I've been putting up there, the future you methodology, and then some other ones that I can't wait to talk to you about super soon. They're going to be popping up there soon. So if you haven't visited dustinpead.com slash free in a while, go ahead and head on over there today to grab some free stuff for you and your team.
So here's what I want you to remember. Completion is not about perfection. It's about purpose and when your work serves its intended purpose, you're done. Everything beyond that is a choice. It's not a requirement. Creative professionals and agencies that I work with who experience the most growth and satisfaction are those who have mastered the art of completing. They finish strong, they celebrate their wins, and they use that momentum to fuel their next project. They've discovered that completion is actually more creative than the endless revisions.
So if you're ready to transform your creative process and build systems that create sustainable success, I'd love to help. Visit DustinPead.com to learn about how we can work together. Go to the contact page, hop on my calendar for a free strategy session of how we can do this. Follow me at DustinPead, P-E-A-D on social media for daily insights on scaling your creative business with clarity. Remember, your creative work deserves to be finished celebrated and shared with the world. Don't let the pursuit of perfection rob you of the beauty of completing.
Next week, we're tackling one of the biggest challenges creative leaders face, leading without crushing creativity. We're gonna explore how to provide structure that your team needs to thrive while protecting the creative freedom that makes great work possible to begin with. I can't wait to talk with you all about that next time on Creativity Made Easy. Have an amazing week.