Conventional thinking:  When I start a task I must continue working on it until it is completed, otherwise I am not being thorough.  I must commit to finish everything that I start.

Contrarian thinking:  If you start working on a task and find out that it is not worth completing it, just stop.  Don’t work on something to completion for the sake of showing your commitment to finishing what you start.  What are you trying to prove?

Have you ever started reading a book and found out half way through it that it did not meet your expectations and that it was not as interesting as you thought it was initially?  What do you do then?  Continue reading it until the end or just abandon it at that point.  I would highly encourage you to simply abandon it as soon as you find out that it is not meeting your expectations.  There is no point in finishing reading a book just to say that you read it cover to cover.

How about reading the newspaper?  Do you really need to read every article in the paper just because you paid 75c for it?  Instead just read the headlines, and in a few seconds scan through the articles that grab your attention.  If an article is interesting, then read it.  If not, move on.  What if you don’t find any interesting articles to read?  Throw the newspaper away.  The 75c you paid is not worth the time you would spend reading uninteresting articles just to get your money’s worth.

This principle can be applied to just about any task that you can think of.  Give yourself the right to change your mind half-way through the task and stop if you find that your efforts are being wasted.  Don’t stop simply because the task becomes challenging.  There are times when it makes sense to stop a task because you find out it is harder than what you had in mind initially.  But if you get into the habit of giving up on everything at the first sign of difficulty you will never accomplish anything substantial in life.

The point here is that you are the ultimate judge of what is worthwhile completing, not someone else whose expectations you are trying to meet.  And you certainly should not yield to some meaningless psychological pressure to complete something simply because you started it.  That would just be ineffective.

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