Motivation Monday: Stop Waiting to Feel Ready

You are as ready as you say you are.

Read that again if you need to.

Not as ready as you feel. Not as ready as the conditions allow. As ready as you decide to be.

That is the whole thing. And once you really understand it, the excuse of not feeling ready starts to fall apart pretty quickly.

Readiness Is a Story You Tell Yourself

Think about the Apollo missions. When NASA launched the first men to the moon, were they one hundred percent certain the mission would succeed? That everyone would return safely?

No. They knew it was a risk. A significant one. But they went anyway. Because waiting for absolute certainty would have meant never going at all.

Life works the same way. You could get hit by a bus tomorrow morning. Walking out of your front door is technically a risk. Readiness, true complete readiness where every variable is accounted for and success is guaranteed, does not exist. It never did.

What exists is the decision to go anyway.

What Waiting Actually Costs You

Time.

That is the real price of waiting to feel ready. And time is the one resource that no amount of money, wealth, or success can buy back. You can make more money. You can rebuild something that fell apart. You cannot get back the years you spent waiting for conditions that were never going to arrive.

I spent a long time waiting to feel ready for things. And eventually the restlessness got to be too much and I just decided to go for it. Those turned out to be some of my favorite experiences. Not because they all worked out perfectly. Because I actually did them.

If you wait until you are one hundred percent ready, you may never be.

Prepared Is Not the Same as Ready

I want to be clear about something. Preparation matters. Read the books. Do the research. Learn what you can before you start.

But here is what preparation cannot do. It cannot give you what actual experience gives you. No amount of preparing for something can fully substitute for actually doing it.

Think about it this way. If you spend a year training for a marathon and then never run it, what was the whole point? No one has ever accomplished anything through preparation alone. The accomplishment only happens when you take the actual first step.

When I started Bait Dogs I had read books about entrepreneurship. I had listened to podcasts. I had done a lot of the prep work of what I should know going in. But I never felt ready. I never had that billion dollar idea. I never had the moment where everything clicked and I thought, yes, now is the time.

Eventually I just decided I know gym clothes. I know what I am doing with that. Why not start.

I did not give myself an out. I did not wait around long enough to talk myself out of it. I just started.

Try It One Time

If you are frozen right now, paralyzed by the feeling of not being ready, here is the smallest possible thing you can do.

Try it one time.

Write that song. Write that short story. Paint that picture. Talk to that person. Go for that run. Whatever it is, do it once. You will probably not be great at it. That is completely fine. Nobody is great the first time and the people who are good at things now just do not talk about how bad they were at the beginning.

Here is a piece of advice that sounds strange but I mean genuinely. Find the things you enjoy being bad at.

I am not a good golfer. Not even a little bit. But I love it. Maybe it is the game itself. Maybe it is the four hours of vitamin D I get standing outside. Either way I keep going back. And over the last few years I have actually improved, not because I have some natural talent, but because I was completely fine being bad at it for a while.

A lot of people do things professionally that they were terrible at when they started. It is okay to not be great at the beginning. It is not expected of you.

When Fear Is the Real Problem

Sometimes it is not really about readiness at all. Sometimes it is just fear.

Here is what I do when that happens. I back myself into a corner.

I find a way to make trying my only option. Because when there is no other choice but to do the thing, doing the thing gets a lot easier. Remove the exit. Commit before you can overthink it. See what happens.

It might not work for everyone. But I have found that once I am truly committed to something, however that commitment happens, I usually do it. The waffling is what kills most things before they start.

Why I Actually Started

There was no big dramatic moment when I decided to start Bait Dogs.

I was just sick and tired of feeling stuck. Tired of where I was and the way I saw myself and the way everything felt. I was not looking for a push to start. I was desperately looking for anything to put my energy into.

And honestly, if it had failed in its early days nobody would have remembered it. If it fails right now it might make for a few awkward conversations and then it gets forgotten. The stakes were always smaller than they felt.

That is true for most things you are putting off. The stakes are usually smaller than they feel.

Bite Back Means Just Start

I know by now that Bite Back means a lot of different things across everything we have written. That is kind of the point of a good brand idea. It earns new meaning every time it gets applied to something real.

In this context Bite Back means just start. Just do the thing. Do not sue me, Nike.

I bit back by starting this brand. By getting myself out of that stuck feeling and putting my energy into something that mattered to me. And I want people to feel like they are strong enough to do the same even when they do not feel ready.

Especially when they do not feel ready.

What Nobody Told Me Before I Started

If I could go back and tell myself one thing before launching Bait Dogs, it would be this.

You are going to suck at this. And that is okay.

You are not going to have all the answers. You are not going to know what to do in every situation. But you will not know what to do until you try. And if you try and fail you will learn something that no amount of preparation could have taught you.

The learning only happens in the doing.

What I Want You to Do Right Now

Not succeed. Not do well. Not get it right.

Just try.

Whatever it is that you have been putting off because you do not feel ready, try it once. Give yourself permission to be bad at it. Give yourself permission to figure it out as you go.

You are as ready as you say you are.

So say you are ready.

And go.

We are the underdogs. We don't stay down, we bite back.