Stop waiting to feel ready
Hey Reader,
I spent a full year telling myself I wasn’t ready to start this newsletter.
I had all the excuses:
“I need to find my voice first.”
“I need to study more written content.”
“I need to figure out the monetization strategy, so I don’t waste time.”
You know what finally taught me my voice?
Writing the damn newsletter. Pushing through every Saturday with no clue what I was doing.
That’s when it hit me: there’s a version of self-improvement that looks like progress but is actually a hiding spot.
It sounds like this:
“Once I heal my trauma, then I can start dating.”
“Once I overcome my ADHD, then I can start a business.”
Once I _____, then I’ll _____.
These all sound so responsible.
That’s what makes them so dangerous.
Because at some point, the thing you’re trying to fix stops being a problem and starts becoming your identity. You’re no longer someone who has a block, you are someone who is blocked.
Action > motivation
There’s a principle in clinical psychology called Behavioral Activation.
It was developed in the 70s and the idea is painfully simple: action comes before motivation, not the other way around.
Put another way: when you wait to feel better before doing something, you’ll stay stuck. But when you take small actions despite not feeling ready, your motivation and mood improve after you move.
There’s a famous study from Atomic Habits that nails this brilliantly:
On the first day of photography class the professor split students into two groups.
Group A) the “quantity” group: graded purely on how many photos they took (90 = A, 80 = B, 70 = C, etc)
Group B) the “quality” group: graded on one single photo, so it had to be near perfect.
Which group would you put your money on?
Most people say quality. One perfect shot beats a hundred mediocre ones, right?
But almost all the best photos, the ones you’d actually want to hang on a wall, came from the quantity group.
While the quality group sat around theorizing about the perfect image, the quantity group was in the darkroom every day, getting reps, playing with angles, composition, and lighting.
Group A won by doing more, not by thinking more.
Starting is the fix. It always has been.
Proof you know this
Carl Jung echoed this when he said:
“your biggest problems can’t be solved, they can only be outgrown.”
How true is that?
I’m sure you have a few things you can think of that you didn’t try to solve, they just sorted themselves out once you got moving.
Did you “solve” your heartbreak, or did you just start living again and one day realize it didn’t hurt anymore?
You likely didn’t sit down and “figure out” your career, you just tried enough random stuff that something eventually clicked.
And did you really “solve” your fear of failure, or did you just fail enough times that it lost its power over you?
Life is basically one giant game of exposure therapy: the facing IS the treatment.
Nobody has ever felt ready to do something meaningful for the first time. What we call “readiness” is really just familiarity, and of course, you can’t be familiar with something you haven’t done yet!
So by definition, you will never feel ready for the thing you keep putting off.
AND… here’s what you may not have considered: it’s easy to calculate the risk of starting too soon (cringe, failure, rejection, etc), but it’s harder to calculate the cost of not starting.
It motivates me to think of it this way: what does another year of “getting ready” actually cost you?
In relationships not pursued.
In the version of yourself you keep postponing.
Your 3 questions
I want to leave you with three questions that helped me.
I don’t sit down and answer these. I just let them float in the back of my mind whenever the ‘not ready’ trap shows up.
- What if you didn’t need to feel ready?
- What if it didn’t matter why?
- What would you do today if you stopped waiting?
You don’t need another breakthrough, you need step one.
See you next saturday,
CK
