Let's be real... telling everyone goes before actually starting it

I am desperately hoping the people I tell about my ideas will steal them so the project will exist without me having to do anything.

Apparently, the dopamine rush of telling someone about your project, you going back to school, you getting healthy, improving yourself, etc is so strong it's basically pre-rewarding you for it. The result is scientifically-documented drops in people following-through and achieving their goals... You want to succeed? Don't tell anyone until you're already almost there!

All I see is that this cycle is more efficient.

I almost didn't finish a PhD because of this. It's like telling people about makes it feel like you've accomplished something and made some progress on it - when that's factually wrong.

I'm sure that there's a name for this phenomenon, something in psychology.

No, seriously, i am working on it!

check this dope URL I picked up, I have an idea and it's totally going to be viral

You can put this on the ADHDmemes community too and it will fit just as well.

Well I'm triggered

Quick, what was your last project you didn't finish?

For me it was app to prepare for nautical exams. I wrote a scraper that downloaded all official tests and answer sheets, trained image recognition model to find the marked answers and started working on parsing the question PDFs but then I had to find a new job and never got back to it.

Tbh at the moment I just have an idea, tell everyone about it, and I have no energy for it for 2 weeks and forget about it. It's more frustrating because you don't even get the satisfaction of starting anything and seeing the early rapid progress before ditching it

This is fine. Projects that require specialized skills can require that you get heavily invested before you discover the implications, scope and yeah your own lasting interest.

Looks like me ye indeed