You Are The Something You’ve Been Waiting For

“One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour.
Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.
No man has learned anything rightly, until he knows that every day is Doomsday.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do you know what the most common question I get in Ask Sid is? It’s not about time management or procrastination (though those are common questions). The most common question I find is actually particular breed of question, and it’s some variation of this:

I want to (do something very important to me),
but (I am waiting for something to happen).
How can I (make progress on the thing I really want to do)?

The answer? Sometimes, the answer is a certain tool or technique you need – but that’s not what I think the answer is most of the time…

If you’re anything like me, then take a moment to reflect when you find yourself waiting for something. Take a moment and ask yourself – do I really need that “something” to begin? Because if you take a step back, you may just find that …

You Are The “Something” You’ve Been Waiting For

(This post was inspired by Fear To Fuel)

I’ve touched on this before when I’ve discussed blaming “the situation” – but I think very often we do use external circumstances, and waiting for them to be “just right” before we actually take any action.

The real danger here though is that waiting for “something” is an action – and the action is that you’re dumping today. I’ll perhaps discuss it in detail in the future, but I call this time dumping – and we do it all the time. We hit fast forward to get to the future, but there’s no rewind – once you dump that time, it’s gone forever.

Today, you’ve got 24 hours sitting in the palm of your hand, you have infinite possibilities and dreams that you can move forward on – but we often instead decide that we’ll wait. One more day. One more week. Until the kids are grown up, or until the weather gets better, or until we have more money, etc.

Underneath all that though, the real reason we wait for everything to be perfect is very often because we’re afraid. We’re afraid that if we don’t do our groundwork just right, if we don’t learn enough, if we aren’t prepared – that we’ll fail. There’s a fine line though between being prepared for opportunity – and endlessly spinning your wheels in metawork.

So, lets look at the three scenarios that can come from any decision you make today – and yes, failure is one of them.

There Are Three Scenarios – Including Failure

I watched a great talk by Jonathan Fields recently (embedded below – RSS subscribers, please click here to view) and there were three questions in the talk he gave that really struck me. They seem very familiar, and I’m sure others have touched on the concept – but the way Jonathan discussed it really resonates with me.

The concept discussed in his presentation boiled down to this:

Why is it that some people are paralyzed by fear, while others, who are also afraid, still move forward on their dreams?

It’s a difficult question to answer, but one way of looking at it is that we often focus on a worst case scenario in case we fail – and as Jonathan notes, we often blow failure out of proportion, thinking we’ll end up with everything totally in shambles. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves though – let’s look at the three questions.

The three questions are:

What will happen if you fail and recover?
What will happen if you do nothing?
What will happen if you succeed?

Think about each scenario realistically, and first consider failure.

What Will Happen If You Fail?

As Jonathan mentions, we very often consider failure as an absolute end, and that we’ll never find a way out of it. However, the reality is that we’re resilient – and if you take the time to consider how you would recover, it may be less painful than you think.

Jonathan discusses painting a realistic picture of failure, and what your recovery will look like. Do you lose 6 months, a year? If pursuing your passion involves dipping into your savings for a few months and leaving your job – could you get back on track? No two situations are the same, but the truth is failing and recovering is probably not as bad as you may have initially thought.

Waiting Is Worse Than Failing

Now that you’ve considered failure, consider what happens if you wait - what if you do nothing for 5, 10, 15, 20 years – where do you end up? What if you change nothing and continue down this trajectory?

Jonathan points out that if you go through this thought exercise, and if you’re holding back on pursuing your dreams – you may find that waiting is much worse than trying and failing. One of my favorite quotes that reminds me to never wait on the things I really want to do is:

“To always be intending to live a new life, but never find time to set about it – this is as if a man should put off eating and drinking from one day to another till he be starved and destroyed.”
– Walter Scott

Finally, consider success

What Happens If You Succeed?

Jonathan touches on how you may have some fear of success – and you may be holding back because you’re afraid you may not be able to keep up the pace if your dream becomes a reality, or perhaps will be overwhelmed with customers if you start your own business, etc. Take a moment to ask yourself – what happens if I succeed? How will my life be different, and what actions can I take to mitigate the problem of having too many customers.

Don’t just daydream – really visualize it, visualize how you’d go from success tomorrow, to a month from now, to perhaps five years from now.

The Video – And Some of My Favorite Quotes

This article was inspired by Fear To Fuel, and by the video below.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from Jonathan’s talk – but the whole thing is worth watching

“This is my one chance. I don’t get do-overs.”

“There is no sideways in life – there’s up or down.”

“I cannot resign myself to the notion of living the rest my life in a vacuum of regret.
I cannot resign myself to the notion that I will have spent time on this earth with never having done anything to actually come alive out of fear.
And I cannot, I cannot fathom the notion that in some way through my actions of inactions I may have taught my daughter a little girl to do the same.”

If you want more, you should check out Nathan Hangen and Karl Staib’s new website Fear To Fuel – it’s absolutely brilliant. I think you’ll really enjoy it.