Hey there,
Finishing what you start is overrated.

Leonardo da Vinci finished maybe a dozen paintings in his lifetime. Yet his work in painting had a massive influence.

One of his most-influential unfinished projects was a mural for the Hall of the 500, in the Palazzo Vecchio, in Florence.

You can’t go there and see it. All that survives are copies of copies by other artists.

The Battle of Anghiari was never finished, but it was published. The sketches were on display, publicly – "published" in the purest sense of the word – for several years.

Since this mural was done in competition with another artist, named Michelangelo, young artists flocked to Florence to study the sketches on display.

Michelangelo didn’t finish his mural, either. But the sketches alone had a big influence on High Renaissance art. One artist called them, "The school of the world."

Contrast this with many other things Leonardo never finished. The observations that lie hidden in his notes would have advanced humanity by centuries in the fields of medicine, flight, geology, and more. These sketches and notes weren’t finished – but, most tragically, they weren’t published.

You don’t have to finish to have an impact. You do have to publish.

Aphorism: "Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind." —Rudyard Kipling

Book: The Case Against Education makes a compelling argument about why the formal education system may be a waste.

Best,
David
P.S. A great way to publish regularly is to have a writing habit. A new cohort of my free email course, 100-Word Writing Habit starts Wednesday.