> A friend of mine has all these failed hobbies he tells everyone he’s going to do

IME over years, when you're talking about doing something your actually doing it is thwarted. I've noticed that that both with myself and with others.

Keeping mum and going about it privately, then sharing it when done, seems to have much higher success rates.

I've tried to reason through it in many different ways: talking about it satisfies you and you don't seek satisfaction from the actual implementation of the idea; talking about it "dissipates the energy"; and a number of other attempts at explanation.

But beyond explanations, the anecdata seems to suggest that doing much precede talking about. Even when you're developing something (say, software) in public, first you do then you talk about it in the commit message.

This seems to parallel the old dictum that ideas are easy, while working to realize them is the actually hard part. Who'd have thought.

I agree wholeheartedly. It's like the energy and motivation has to go somewhere, and talking too much is a vacuum.

I wrote a (shortish) book with someone once who was obviously much more attracted to the idea of being an author than actually writing a book.

I've worked for a few bosses/ceos like this. Far more interested in being seen as someone with a particular title or company and far less interested in what it takes to actually make that worth something.

Many people like the idea of X much more than the reality of X.

> It’s much more impressive to say you have done something than to say you’re going to do it.

From my experience, you have to do both otherwise someone else takes what you do, markets as his own and you get scraps. It keeps happening to me, since I don't generally like to talk about what I do. And I think fundamentally it's a big difference between European and American culture.

Might be more of a difference between what to do in your working (employee) life vs in your private life. In your private life, you can't get scraps because it's generally work on things you own, like a business, personal fitness, skills, etc. In your employee life, you're generally working on things that you don't own for recognition to get a promotion or raise. There the recognition is the entire point and people may not look too deeply into who did what, so you may need to be more overt about things.

I notice that if you get to the point you could be doing something any extra thought is probably counter productive but to talk about it might even end it.

The entrepreneurial spirit isn't visiting you to talk about things.

>more impressive to say you have done something than to say you’re going to do it.

Even more impressive to do and not say.

>It's much more comfortable

It can be even more amazing what can be accomplished during a time when comfort is not being sought.