Ready, Set, Go! What happened? Why didn’t you go? Oh, you weren’t ready? You need a little bit more time. Some research needs to be done. It’s not perfect. It doesn’t look the way you want it to. It’s summer, people are on vacation. The holidays are approaching, people are busy. People might not like it, they might not like you, you might fail.

I’ve been there so many times, I could kick myself for every second I wasted getting ready to get ready. You know what I got from doing that? Older.

I’m all for a good plan, a thought-out strategy, being well-prepared, vetting an idea, practicing prudence, and calculated risks. I am not for making up excuses as to why now is not a good time. If you think later might be better, it’s not, that’s just your fear talking. Guess what? Later is going to be just as scary, inconvenient, and busy as now. No matter what, you are going to face the same fears. The only thing that is going to get you ready to do that thing, is making yourself do it. And it’s pretty much guaranteed that after you do it, you’ll think of ways you could have done it better, different, more effectively but none of that matters because you did it. You get to smile, and know that you did it, you get to feel proud of yourself, and you get to learn from the experience so that next time you can do it even better. No amount of preparation will teach you as much as the actual experience. I’ve learned from getting out of the spin cycle of getting ready to get ready, and then falling on my face, that the good feeling of actually doing something far outweighs the feeling of failure. That when I dusted myself off, the experience was actually worth it, and because I moved forward I was presented with a whole new set of opportunities that wouldn’t be there for me if I was still standing in the same place – getting ready to get ready.