246 ☼ Give Your Project an Ending Before You Start
The 2014 essay that changed how I begin everything
Dear friends,
In 2014 I read a short essay that completely changed the way I work. It was called “No More Forever Projects,” and was written by Diana Kimball Berlin. I still think about it every time I start something since.
The core idea is simple. We tend to load our starting moments with promises. We announce a thing as lifelong, ongoing, a movement, the start of something big. We tell ourselves the weight of that promise is what gives the work meaning. Diana noticed the opposite was true. The promise of forever did not create momentum. It created a slow pressure that made the work harder to sustain and heavier to carry.
She took a lesson from our mutual pal Jamie Wilkinson who had a different rule:
No more forever projects.
Or, in practical terms: Treat every project as a one-time thing, with a beginning you celebrate and an ending you actually reach. If it turns out to be worth repeating, you can always choose to do it again. As Diana put it, “By ending well, you give yourself the freedom to begin again.”
When I read that the first time I felt such a sense of relief and calm. For years, many of my ideas died in my own head. Not because they were bad idea, but because they were too big. I would get a spark for a project, and within an hour I had designed a whole cathedral. I would map out the book, the exhibition, the events, the webshop, the membership, the five-year arc. I built a destination so far away that I needed skills I did not have and money I had not earned, all before I had made a single photo.
So, in the end, I would make nothing. The idea would sit there, getting more elaborate and more impossible, until the weight of not starting was louder than the excitement of the idea itself. I had a graveyard of ambitious projects without a single photo taken.
Maybe you know this feeling? There is a project you keep meaning to start, but it keeps getting bigger and further away the longer you wait.
Diana’s essay gave me a form of permission to do the opposite of thinking big. It helped me to think small and finite, and to decide the ending of a project before I started. Now every project I make has a wall built into it from day one. A timeframe or a number. A shape I am not allowed to think past.
The Best Medicine was a community documentary project about 101 English-language comedians. That was the whole brief. Not a media empire about comedy. One hundred and one portraits, then a zine from that work and a show to launch it.
Vliegwiel was about 100 startup founders and their thoughts on what the Dutch government could do to help them build better and stronger for the benefit of the country. Then a zine from that work, and a launch party. That was the plan, and our secret hope was that we’d get a government official to receive the first copy which worked out in ways better than we could have dreamed up when the newly appointed minister of economic affair attended our launch and did just that. Read more about it in Process 231 and 238.
Creatives In/AMS is a weekly photo essay series about Amsterdam-based creatives that runs for one year, which means 52 people and then a finish line. I worked on CI/AMS for nearly five years and just started publishing these stories on a dedicated website at CreativesIn.co which looks like this:
My photo book NOTICE was built out of a body of work I made in Vancouver during the first few months of the pandemic, when I went on a meditative photo walk every day for 123 days in a row. Why 123 days? Because that’s how many days I was there for once I started the walks. That was not planned out in advance, but just how life happened. What I did plan was that I was going to put the work in and build a daily creative habit by going on these long 10k walks every afternoon. It flowed from there.
I use this system for everything, not just my photography projects. My comedic video series The Chain was a 6-episode season, with a beginning, a middle, and an end I could actually reach. It turned out to be so much fun that I wrote a second season with 5 more episodes, to be filmed soon. Here is the first season:
My latest project community documentary project 26 in 2026 has its limit sitting right there in the name. In case you missed it, that’s my project for which we photographed 26 year old Amsterdammers and asked them how they felt about the future. We shot it on a brick of Kodak film that expired in the year 2000 (the year of the sitters’ birth) in a single marathon studio day just yesterday. Here is what I came home with at the end of the day:
This project has several built-in limitations: 1 studio day, people who are 26 years old and live in Amsterdam, how many rolls of film I had from the year 2000.
These numbers are not a cage. They provide the frame work and the limitation that lets me start. When the scope is fixed, the project stops being a vague forever and turns into a list of doable steps. Photograph one. Then the next. The finish line is close enough to see, which means the start is close enough to take.
Something we know to end, a finite numbers, does not mean small or unserious. Some of the work I am proudest of started as an experiment with an end date. Finishing one project well is what gives me the energy and the freedom to begin the next one. So if you have a project you keep putting off because it feels too big, I want to offer you the same permission Diana offered me.
You do not have to build the whole cathedral. You do not need the webshop, the gallery show, or the perfect plan before you take the first frame. You need a subject you care about, a limit you can see the end of, and the willingness to start this week.
Here is the simple version I use:
Pick one subject, place, or question you keep returning to.
Give it a finite shape. A number of photos, a number of people, a number of weeks. Something you could actually finish.
Decide now what the ending looks like. A zine, a small set of prints, a single post, a wall in your hallway. Name the finish line before you take the first photo.
Make the first picture this week. Just one.
That is the whole method. No forever. Just a beginning that already knows how it ends.
Share this issue with a friend who gets stuck and could get something out of reading it.
Your Turn — Giveaway
I would love to hear from you in the comments: what is a project you have been putting off because it feels too big? And what would a finite version of it look like? Give it a number or an end date right there in your comment. Sometimes saying it out loud is the whole start. I will randomly select one of the comments as the winner of this week’s Process Giveaway and they will receive a package with some surprise goodies, including some film, a book from my collection, and more.
NEXT WEEK: A surprise, also for myself.
Quick note: we were gonna start with the Process Workbook Vol. 5 issues this week, but for scheduling reasons we had to move this back two weeks. Very excited to start on it with you all!
And finally, a thank you to Diana Kimball Berlin for writing the article that inspired this issue. Read the original here.
Warmly,
Wesley
P.S. Chapter 3 of 52 of my new series Creatives In/AMS was published. It’s about leatherworker and designer Chenda Fekkes. Check out the chapter on the CI/AMS website or on IG.
P.P.S. All my film is developed by Carmencita Film Lab. They’re the best and they clearly love what they do. Use code PROCESS for a free upgrade.
Few Ways To Support Process
If Process adds something to your week, here’s how to help keep it going: grab a copy of my photo book NOTICE Journal Volume One or the Process Workbook series. Volume 5 just came out and is an 80-page step-by-step guide on how to make your own book or zine.
Process Photo Club members get 40% off NOTICE and 100% off all five Workbooks. Not a member yet? Join here.
Process Photo Club members get the PWB5 for free, plus all four previous workbooks (€60 in savings on day one), 40% off my photo books, 30% off workshops, and more.
Browse the Process Archive for more articles.
Thank you so much for writing this. I'm struggling with too many ideas and starting none. It seems because they are too big and too complex. So, this afternoon I'm going to sit down with pen and paper, pick one project and give it a beginning, a middle and an end. Phew, even the thought of it makes me more relaxed and hopeful. Booklet one, here I come!
I would say ‘this came to me at through right time’ but by the sentiment of the message itself there wouldn’t been no wrong time, as none of my photo projects have an end date!! My apartment complex photo series, phone booths, cars under cover, on set stills at work… all ongoing and none with an end date. Until now…! This mornings coffee will assign an end date to them all! Thanks for the wise words as always 🙏 love the Substack/newsletter.