You only get rewards when you kill the monster

Games

Damage a monster to 99% health, then run away? Zero experience points.

Games are brutally honest about this. You can beat a monster down to a sliver of health, to its last HP, but if you don’t kill it, the system acts like you never fought it. No experience, no loot, nothing.

What’s even dumber? Pulling 5 monsters at once, getting each to half health, then running away because you’re about to die. Looks busy, accomplished nothing.

Veterans know: focusing on killing one monster at a time is more efficient than fighting 5 simultaneously.

Of course, if you’re strong enough with area-of-effect skills to clear them all at once, that’s different. But until you have that power, stick to one at a time.

The moment you kill the monster, the system settles your account. Experience points, gold, equipment—all delivered at once. That’s the rule of the game: no kill, no reward.

Reality

In reality, we’re all fighting a bunch of half-dead monsters.

The novel we started writing, the side project we got halfway through, the book we read three chapters of, the guitar we practiced for two weeks before quitting. Each one damaged to 30% health before moving on to a new monster.

Why? Because fighting new monsters is the most exciting. The first 10% is always the most thrilling, full of possibilities. Once you hit the middle and it gets boring, or you spot a cooler monster, or realize you’re not as good as you thought, you abandon the wounded monster and run.

But unfinished projects give you no experience points.

That unfinished book won’t be read by anyone. That half-built app won’t launch. Those half-learned skills won’t be useful.

Worse still, these wounded monsters occupy your mental RAM. Your brain keeps remembering “I still have something unfinished,” background processes constantly running, slowing you down.

Focus is a limited resource. Unlike in games, we don’t have area-of-effect skills. Fighting 10 monsters simultaneously won’t make you 10 times stronger—it’ll just mean you kill none of them.

People without a track record of finishing don’t deserve to multitask. First prove you can kill them one by one, then talk about fighting multiple at once.

And actually, fighting one at a time levels you up faster than fighting many simultaneously.

Go look at your wounded monsters right now. Pick one, kill it. Or declare it abandoned and delete it from your task list so it stops wasting your mental capacity.

Half-finished projects won’t make you stronger. Only completed projects count.

Remember: experience points always settle on the final blow. You only get rewards when you kill the monster.