Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done

by Jon Acuff

As I started to work on my goals more aggressively, here are four things I chose to bomb: Keeping up with TV conversations I have not watched Breaking Bad, Stranger Things, or The Walking Dead. There were sixty-two episodes of Breaking Bad, representing 42 minutes of content each. That’s a total of 2,604 minutes, or 43 hours. That’s ninety-six different 30-minute sessions you could have hustled on a goal. My friend told me he watches the entire previous season of a show before a new season starts. Every new twenty-show season really represents forty episodes to watch. I’m not against TV, and love the show This Is Us because I like weeping, but I can’t keep up with it and with my goals. So at dinner parties when people rattle off details about popular shows I look like a huge dork and will instead make comments about Seinfeld. Is that wrong? Should I not do that? I tell you, I gotta plead ignorance on this thing. I’m OK with that. I’ve decided to stink at TV. Snapchat Perhaps by the time this book comes out I’ll be amazing at Snapchat, and will be able to deftly apply puppy ears to photos of me eating lunch, but I doubt it. I have friends who keep trying to get me on it, but when I ask why, their only answer is, “Because everybody is doing it.” That’s the same logic that got fifty million Nickelback albums sold. People who post twenty times a day are kidding themselves when they pretend they can do long-form thought while also being interrupted constantly to let people know...