You will Never be Ready to Do Anything
There is one word missing in the title. Can you guess that word? No?
Well, let me take that word out of the closet. You will never be ready to do anything REMARKABLE!
Mr. Dreamer, like his name, had been cherishing a dream to venture into his own startup since he was a school kid. He was inspired by the spectacular people who started from ground zero and laid the foundation of billion-dollar empires. He wanted to be one of those well-endowed people.
However, as Mr. Dreamer completed his engineering, his parents wanted him to pursue his career in the same industry. “Make your future secure” is what we have been fed with since childhood.
Mr. Dreamer (to himself) “This is not the right time. I am not 100% ready. My parents had been through a lot of pain and hardships to see me as an engineer like my elder brother. Besides, I need to learn the ropes of becoming a successful entrepreneur.”
Like any usual kid, Mr. Dreamer placed his dream on the back burner and waited for that ‘one day.’ After being a part of the grinding wheel of the job for five years, one day, Mr. Dreamer decided to once again chase his passion for being an entrepreneur. He had been saving for this entrepreneurship journey and learning the mechanics of business for all these years. By now, he had also charted a foolproof plan after periodic revisions. As he typed his resignation and was about to click ‘send’, he found himself enveloped in a tug of war.
Mr. Dreamer (again to himself) “Wait a minute, what if my plan fails? My parents, my fiancée, and everyone around would tag me as a loser. I am still not 100% ready. I need to learn the microscopic traits of business to ensure that I do not fail.”
And there goes the index finger on the ‘cancel’ button.
After another ten years, Mr. Dreamer again got reminded of his long-harbored aspiration. But this time, he again reverberated the same dialect, “I need to take care of my kid’s education, I am not 100% ready.”
Today, waiting for that ‘one day,’ 80-year-old Mr. Dreamer lies on the deathbed. With a trail of tears wetting the pillow. With his gaze stuck at the ceiling, he is wondering how life would have been if he had pursued his dream. Today he would have died with no regrets.
“But wait, I am not 100% ready for death,” he murmurs, and teeee…eee…eee… goes the heart rate monitor.
There was one more man, whose last words were monosyllables, repeated three times, “OH WOW, OH WOW, OH WOW!” We all know that person by the name of Steve Jobs.
Now, why is it that most people live a life of regret, whereas, there are some people who can hit the ball out of the park?
Because the latter ones do not wait for that ‘one day,’ they do not wait to be 100% ready. They consume. They hustle. They create.
They even go against the current, learn from their failures, and make their dreams come true. They are the ones who become household names because they are ‘the doers.’ We all know them by the expanse of their achievements, but we usually forget that they might have failed even more times than they succeeded. Albeit, their failures are what make the trajectory for them to succeed.
Had Thomas Edison not failed 10000 times, we would have been living our life in the dark. Had the kid who could not speak fluently until the age of 9 said to himself, “I am not 100% ready,” he would not have become the iconic scientist Albert Einstein. Had Colonel Sanders not broken himself free from the cobweb of “I am not 100% ready” at the age of 62, we would have missed the palate-appeasing foods throughout our life. Had J.K. Rowling, while sitting on the pile of rejections, said to herself, “I am not 100% ready,” Harry Potter would have been unknown to this world.
Therefore, winners do not wait on the bank for the tide to tail away. They know time and tide wait for none; they dare to split across the uprising waters and make their headway to glory.
So, are you the grasshopper who prefers staying in the comfort zone and wait for things to happen or the ant who prefers making things happen?
If you want to live a remarkable life, do not wait for yourself to be 100% ready to do something remarkable. The right time is right now! “You must disobey the voice in your head that says, I’m not ready yet,” Marie Forleo writes in her book, Everything Is Figureoutable. When you start before you are ready, you get the momentum on your side. You don’t even have to map out every step of your vision or dream just yet.
So, what comes up for you when I say that?
