We are never ready
Comedian Mike Birbiglia has a great joke about punctuality, in which he notes that while ‘early’ lasts for hours, and ‘on time’ exists for just a moment, ‘late’ subsequently lasts forever. (I do wonder if his ushers deliberately coordinate the timing of letting the latecomers into the theatre in the clip… call me cynical, but that seems just a little too perfect, dontcha think?)
His conclusion is, therefore, that if you want to be on time, you actually have to be early.
As a person who is naturally predisposed to being late to absolutely everything, I completely agree. I’ve actually managed to alter my habits such that most people who’ve met me in the last decade or so would probably think of me as an ‘on time person’, but this is not my natural tendency; I’ve simply learned to turn up to everything early.
As a business coach, I see parallels between Mike’s point about punctuality, with the general concept of readiness. One of my main functions as a coach is simply to push people to act before they feel ready. In almost every situation, someone who waits until they feel ready has in fact either missed the opportunity entirely, or at the very least squandered a heap of the upside for action.
Why? Because if you want to be ‘on time’, you actually have to be ‘early’.
Almost everyone knows the feeling of nervousness that comes when you know you could act, but don’t yet feel ready. That’s like being ‘early’.
Then there’s the moment where you finally feel ready, so you act (the equivalent of ‘on time’, in Mike’s joke). If your life has been anything like mine, when you wait for that moment the outcome almost always comes as an anticlimax. It’s nowhere near as frightening (or exciting) as you expected, and you wonder why you were so nervous about it.
If you manage to slide past that moment still without action, you’ll tend to find that the energy for the decision has dissipated, the opportunity is largely over, and you’ll often find that you subsequently don’t bother acting at all. Sound familiar? (It’s painfully—PAINFULLY—familiar to me!). This is essentially the worst of all worlds. You’ve still invested all the effort into the preparation for the action. You’ve paid the entry-fee in stress, anxiety, and emotional energy.
The only thing lacking is anything resembling a payoff. What a waste.
Mike’s advice is simple. “It’s so easy to be on time. You just have to be early”.
My advice for action in business is pretty much the same. It’s easy to get ready. You just have to act before you’re ready.
Make sense?
Good.
So, if you want to turn reading this missive into something more useful than simply a confirmation of an existing belief you held, why don’t you try this…
Identify something you’ve been thinking about doing in your work that brings up feelings of anxiety and stress. Something that, if it worked out, would almost certainly create a strong positive payoff. Something that your fragile ego (don’t worry, we’ve all got one) keeps making excuses about to avoid doing (don’t worry, they all do that).
Got it?
Great.
Now do it.
If me telling you to do it isn’t enough, maybe the sage words of Hugh Laurie will get you over the line:
“It's a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you're ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now. And you may as well do it now. Generally speaking, now is as good a time as any.”—Hugh Laurie
You wouldn’t ignore the advice of House, would you…?