Self social engineering: tell everybody about it so you're going to lose face if you drop it without a good reason. This doesn't mean you cannot drop a project every week or two, but you must accomplish at least something before doing it or discover it's a dead end. And if you succeed people will cheer you.
Don't know about the psychology behind it but I'll add a data point in support of this.
Whenever I do any kind of creative work (programming, music, etc.) I always stall out if I reveal what I'm doing to other people before it's in a near-completed state. Something about the knowledge that other people may be observing causes me to think about a project in terms of how it will be perceived by others as opposed to precisely what I want it to be. The sad thing is that usually probably no one is observing and I'm entirely psyching myself out, but this realization has definitely led me to be more disciplined about secrecy when working on anything.
