I've been working on my next website pretty nonstop (albeit part time, we all have a day job, right?) for the last month. I'm 90% done with everything and am so close to finishing I can taste it. Now I just have to finish the job.

And while I know that I am so very close to finishing this project, this last 10% is going to be harder and slower than any previous part of this project. Once I’m done, I have to be able to say “okay, this is good.” There can’t be any niggling details I have skipped over because they’re not as fun to tackle. Once I say I’m finished, I have to show it to the world.

That last part is always hard. We start everything thinking that we are going to do things better than those who have done them before. Nobody (at least, I hope nobody) starts something thinking they’ll do an okay job at it. We want to be the best, to have other people point to our work and say, “I wish I had done that.”

Maybe it’s the fear of letting myself down or my work not being accepted by the rest of the world. It’s probably that once I hit that 100% point, I will have actualized my vision and it may not live up to what I saw in my head months ago when I started working on this. There are no more excuses like “I’ll get to that later” or “the final version won’t look like that.” It’s done.

The trick is getting yourself to finish that last 10%. That’s where the magic happens; the part where you finish those little details that separate good work from great work. I have no tricks for how to get there; how you do that is completely up to you. Finishing is the difference between talking about what you want to do (which is interesting only to you) and showing off what you have done.