Are any of your projects laughing at you?

My wife is designing, and making, a quilt for a competition. A couple of days ago she did a wholesale change of the design. When I asked her if it what she had planned to do was just too difficult, she told me, “Pretty much everything I did, the quilt was laughing at me.”

She's a great quilter and makes great quilt designs, and this about-face wasn't because of lack of effort.  She's cutting her losses, and the new design is working much better.  (She showed me some of the stitching she did, and I couldn't find where the stitches were until she pointed them out.  Really slick!)

I find that some of my projects are laughing at me, but they're saying, “You took me on, and now you can't finish me.  Hahahaha!”  I hear them laughing at me each time I'm driving to work and one of them pops into my head at a time when I can't really do anything about it.  Having too many goals is like having none and what ends up happening (I'm finding out) is that none of them really flourish.  The projects grow so closely to one another that they choke each other out.

Cutting the losers out of your schedule is hard enough, but backing off from winners to pursue something even bigger must be harder still.  Those projects are laughing with you rather than at you.  J.D. Roth of Get Rich Slowly is looking for a staff writer in order to pursue some publishing deals, and he admits that it “feels like [he's] crossed a threshold into a strange and scary world.”  He is trying to avoid being laughed at by his blog as he pursues these other deals.  He knows the time commitment involved and is willing to risk adding a different voice to his 65k-subscriber blog in order to leave time to pursue these other ventures.

I run across ideas every day but still find it difficult to keep up with the ones I already have.  Too many of my projects are laughing at me.