“There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth. Not going all the way, and not starting.”

— Siddhartha Gautama

We’ve talked about Resistance, that evil Lizard that speaks to us in the dark hours of our fear: “Don’t start; you’re too tired; you’re not ready; you will fail,” it whispers.

The Lizard Has An Evil Twin

There is another vile form of that Resistance, its Evil Twin, that lurks in the shadows, laying in wait along our path: It says, “Stop; you’ve gone far enough; no need to finish now.”

Ann says it’s a variant of the “barn door syndrome.” The cows coming home from the field see the open door to the barn; and they stop to dawdle.

On my ultra training runs, I’ve learned this lesson: It doesn’t matter whether I’m out for 22 miles, 14 miles or an easy 6. The last mile is always the toughest.

This is true in our other projects too: finishing the last revision of a chapter, the last draft of the brief, the final edit of a photo, the final leg of a voyage.

Resistance sets in. Why?

It seems that what we set as our expectation becomes our reality. The barn door appears, near or far, just when we expect it to appear. Not sooner, not later. And when we see the door, we want to quit.

We Want To Quit

• We want to quit because we’re worn out, and exhausted; we tell ourselves we have nothing left.
• We want to quit because we’re so close; close enough; close enough for government work, we say.
• We want to quit because we deserve to quit. We’ve worked hard, we’ve been at it a long time; long enough we tell ourselves.
• We want to quit because we question: our worthiness, our ability, our tenacity.
• We want to quit because we fear rejection: if the world never sees the work, we can never be judged in our inadequacies, we can never be discovered as the frauds we believe ourselves to be.
• We want to quit because we are afraid not to quit. What will it mean to finish? And what now will be expected of us?

Finishing is the critical part of any project, Seth Godin says.  If you don’t finish, you’re a dawdler, not a pro. If you don’t finish, it wasn’t really worth starting.

“Resistance is strongest at the finish,” Steven Pressfield writes in his new book Do The Work.

We Can Beat The Evil Twin – Seven Secrets to Success

So what can we do to overcome this Evil Twin?

• Know the goal. Don’t be fuzzy. We can only hit a target that we can clearly see.
• Keep a vision of the finish clearly in our minds: how good we will feel, how very fine it will be.
• Believe that we cannot fail; that the Universe supports us; that we possess strength beyond our wildest imaginations.
• Take baby steps. Big steps overwhelm. Small consistent steps over long periods of time lead to magnificent results.
• Take rest stops. We need to reward ourselves along the way.
• Believe in the worthiness of the mission. If we don’t believe, we cannot persevere.
• Believe that we deserve to succeed.

Marianne Williamson writes this: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.”

“We are all meant to shine,” she says.

So finish up. Run like the wind. Through the open door.