It’s never the right time…

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A friend of mine called me the other day to discuss his plans to leave his job and start a business in a year. I could feel his excitement, and supported his decision. But the truth is I didn’t really believe in his plan, and I don’t really think he did either. We’ve had this discussion before, many times, and nothing has really come of it. I realized I’ve also had the same conversation with myself, many times, over the last few years but always stopped short of doing it. The problem with the plans we made was they relied on one event that never happens: the eureka moment that tells you it’s time.

There are a lot of scary things in life..getting married, starting a business, having kid, buying a house, heck even getting a dog. These are all times where we can feel the fear inside of us, attempting to hold us back and keep us safe. Sometimes that fear says it’s not time yet (and sometimes it’s not), but the truth is it’s never the time. It will always be scary, it will always require a leap of faith to do any of these things. I look to my sister as living proof of this.

Andrea is really a great mother. She’s loving, she’s supportive, she takes amazing care of her 9 month old while continuing to take amazing care of herself (one of the more difficult and important parts of being a good parent…from what she tells me). She certainly doesn’t look and act like a person who wasn’t ready to be a mother, but she’ll tell you otherwise. Up to the point when she and her husband decided to have a baby they did not feel it was time. They still wanted to enjoy their pre-adulthood (Andrea classifies anyone who graduated from college but has not yet had a baby as a pre-adult), wanted to travel, to go out at night, to sleep in on weekends, to still just be with themselves. But they felt equally strong about entering a new phase of their life, the responsibility and excitement of parenthood. It didn’t feel like “the time,” but they did it anyway…and it ended up it was after all.

The more exciting and rewarding things in life, often look scary from the outside. My sister had to wonder “how could I, an accomplished pre-adult, possibly be a good mother?” Just as I wonder sometimes “how could I, also an accomplished pre-adult, possibly be ready to start my own business, a real business?” Well, the bad news is that if you’re waiting for the right time to take a big step, as I have, it will never come. The good news is whenever you do take that big step, the time will be right.