An Impractical Guide to False Starts
Everything You Don't Need to Know About Things You Didn't Know You Need to Know
This is James Hazlett Foreman’s newsletter. It used to be called The Collected Foremanea but I changed it to Middlebrow because that is a more accurate title for the kinds of things I plan on posting here in 2025 and it was time for a change anyway.
I wrote this here Impractical Guide about a year or so ago because I was thinking I could do these at a regular cadence. It’s been a year and I’ve written exactly 1.4 of these, but I like how this came out and I still might do more. I dunno, we’ll see. That I wrote a guide to false starts intending it to be the first of a series that I didn’t follow through with is so poetically perfect that it would be funny if it were the only one I did but I had a lot of fun writing it so who knows.
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Have you ever started something that you thought would be more than it turned out to be? They differentiate themselves from the regular kind of start by faltering somewhere in the execution. Let's talk it out.
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Let's Define Our Terms
A false start is a combination of two ideas, two words. One of those ideas is that things have to begin. It's the start, the origin, the beginning.
The other idea, the other word, is false, and it negates the idea that anything was started at all. It also has a lot of shame piled up around and behind it and I'll get to that. But first, let's get something straight: you can't let a fear of not finishing stop you from starting.
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A False Start is Just a Start That Stopped
We vilify false starts because ours is a culture of continuous, unstoppable, compulsively flogged and endlessly worshipped success. We are ashamed of our false starts because the glory is in finishing. Finish already! it's done, let's go, another thing to finish. Next thing to go, let's start the process again.
But the joy of the thing is not just in the finishing.
Do we point to a spot on the dance floor and plant our foot down there and say "done!" Do you only listen to the last note of a song? Do you fill out the crossword puzzle on the next day when all the answers come out?
The point of life is to experience it, not to finish it. Our art, our lives, are not about what we finish. It's about what we do. It's about all those starts.
After all, how many things have ended that never began? How many things began that never ended? In truth, nothing you have ever started is truly unfinished. Not until the end of all things does any one thing end.
A novel you started and didn't finish may yet be picked up by one of your heirs. The Silmarillion was unfinished but we can be quite happy it was begun. The Great Gatsby brings joy to millions, yet it was also unfinished.
How much poorer would our lives have been if nothing was ever begun out of fear of never finishing it?
I would argue that nothing, truly nothing, is ever finished. Oh sure, it can be finished enough, but don't act like you would never take brownies out of the oven a little too soon before eating the entire pan by yourself.
The book you read was finished because the author wrote "the end" at the bottom of the last page but that doesn't mean there weren't some things that the author wishes they had done instead.
And while most of us can't go back and change a novel that's already been written, the story continues. Not even the great Arthur Conan Doyle could kill Sherlock Holmes. That story wasn't finished even when the creator tried everything he could to finish it.
And then after Doyle himself died, and quite finished writing anything at all, Sherlock's story still hasn't ended.
Your false start isn't false until the last atom stops moving and by then, nobody will be around to notice that you never finished that story you started.
So go ahead, start that project. Write those first few words. Scribble that first line on the back of the papers you're grading. It might not go anywhere. You might decide to pick it back up in a year or five. It doesn't matter what you finish, it matters what you start.
The ledger of heaven increases not because of what we finish but because of what we try. We make the beginnings. Let the universe sort out the endings.
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A Personal Sidebar
I have started a lot of things. I have finished far fewer. I have started writing in many notebooks, used a new pen only a few times, taken a first bite of a burger, first dates that led to no second dates, second dates that never led to a third, a million half-hearted and full-hearted beginnings.
I am tempted to be ashamed of them, because shame is a constant companion. I will also never stop feeling ashamed of things that don't warrant it, but I can always try to feel less of it. After all, there is no ledger for shame. The Great Accountant is not going to judge me for not feeling adequate shame about the notebook with only a few pages written in it.
But this is not an Impractical Guide to Shame, it's a guide to False Starts, and the feelings they cause when we're all by ourselves in the dark days of a rainy winter and we're beating ourselves up for something that doesn't matter. Let's grow a little together and not do that anymore.
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False Starts in Sports Can Stop You Cold
The above advice does not apply to sports contests, only creative endeavors. If you are competing in a sport, especially one of the racing sports, then rushing to the finish line is extremely important and I would argue the entire point. In these cases, you do not want to start falsely, you should focus on starting when everybody else starts, because that's the only way to fairly find out who the fastest person is.
Some famous false starts in sports include a tantalizing example in the Wikipedia page for false starts, which includes this gem in the speed skating section: "...a false start occurs when one of more competitors are intentionally slow at taking their starting positions..." which boggles my mind and is an excellent example of what is so great about sports: not the actual rules themselves, but the small ways that competitors eke out a tiny sliver of an advantage by complying with rules in aggressively sloppy ways.
This is a great example. A speed skater can gain a significant advantage simply by futzing around as they take their ready position, as the time between the B of the bang and the G of the bang can be the difference between victory and second place.
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You're In Good Company - A Famous False Starter
Leonardo DaVinci arguably had more false starts than the other kind. Mona Lisa? False start. The Last Supper? False start. Neither of these were ever finished.
The Mona Lisa is "the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied work of art in the world" and it wasn't finished! He started working on it in 1503 and never actually gave it to the person it had been commissioned for. There's even some evidence that he was still noodling around on it 14 years later.
DaVinci was so bad at finishing things in a timely manner that he invented a new way of painting using a combination of tempura and fresco techniques that would let him allegedly get better and brighter colors, but also enabled his inconsistent and capricious work style.
This technique was great in the moment but it meant the whole thing started falling apart practically as soon as he was done. DaVinci's contemporaries who saw his famous Last Supper in its "finished" state as children and then again as adults found it so deteriorated to be unrecognizable.
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How to Finish; False Starts That Lead to Real Things
Even though I have adequately disabused you of the notion that your false starts are something to feel bad about, I don't want the simple sweet joy of finishing something to slip by. After all, finishing is a virtue all of its own and worth celebrating.
In the interests of finishing something, or how to turn a false start into a true start, here are some tips that have worked for me:
Start Small. Don't do too much. Do a little bit today, and then a little bit tomorrow.
Have Faith. Don't be afraid to set something aside. Some ideas were never meant to become more than little starts. Combine enough of the little starts and you might end up with something big enough to be done.
Good Enough is Better Than Perfect. You can't make anything perfect anyway. And you're always going to want to make changes. If you don't know if something is done, get somebody else's opinion.
Lean on Your Mentors. A mentor isn't necessarily somebody who helps you with their actual time and attention, they can be found in every library and book store. Some of them even wrote books that can help.