What accounts for this clarity being derivable only by “finishing” projects (versus, say, keeping one’s attention attuned to input about what one should be working on, and then doing that instead?)
A big benefit of finishing projects is that finishing them often tells you with clarity what you should _really_ have been working on. But you can't get to that insight without finishing. Call it the sunk cost paradox 
https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/1062032179016818691 …
Without the sunk cost fallacy I'm not sure I'd ever have finished anything
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The tweet was mostly a joke, albeit one with some truth. That said, finishing projects pushes you to higher and higher standards, which tends to result in different kinds of insights. Ditto actual public release.
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I think this is the insight behind Amazon’s drafting a press release at the start of a project. Of course that exercise doesn’t uncover everything you learn from actually doing the project, but I imagine it often changes your understanding of the priorities.
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I learned something like this in undergraduate school. Only once I'd finished the paper and turned it in did I really know what I should have been writing. That's just the way exploration goes.
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The issue isn't the sunk cost bias, it's that all of your earlier efforts substantially lowered your marginal cost of completing the project while marginal benefits remained high, so you (rationally) persisted.
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I tend to get that creeping up on me while working. Maybe our different dispositions translates into our propensity for finishing things…
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profound, as it is true. :)
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