“It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.” – Theodore Roosevelt
We talk a lot in this space about planning and vision and all those kinds of good things. It’s critical to think about WHERE you’re trying to go before you start working to get there. It’s important to flesh out what resources you’re going to need and what your barriers are going to be and all that good stuff.
Unfortunately, sometimes we have a tendency to want to be guaranteed of success before we get going. We want to know every resource we could possibly need, and every barrier we could possibly run into, and every possible scenario that could present itself. So we spend weeks or months or years trying to make sure we have everything perfectly lined up so that we know we’ll be successful.
The reality is that no matter how much planning you do there’s never a guarantee of success. You cannot plan away all the risk or uncertainty. All you end up doing is spending your whole career (or life) planning to do something or thinking about doing something or wishing you were doing something – and never actually doing anything.
So think about what it is you really want to accomplish. Think about WHERE you really want to be with your business or your career. Plan, think it through – and then go already. If you wait for the perfect time or the perfection situation, you’ll never do anything but wait. Perfect never happens. Eliminate the risk that you can and then take the leap.
When people look back on their lives or careers, the things they really regret aren’t the things they tried that didn’t quite turn out the way they wanted. The things people really regret are the things they wanted but never really went after. Too often that’s because it was never the perfect time to go after it. Don’t make that mistake and wait for perfect – today might be as close as you get. So go for it.
