“Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.” – William B. Sprague
I hear the phrase, “It’s just not the right time”, or some variation, a lot. I hear it a lot regardless of what’s going on in the world, but right now it’s maybe at an all-time high. We always want to wait to do things we know we need to do until things quiet down, or until we get through this particular challenge, or until we’re not quite so busy. Then it will be the perfect time.
There is no perfect time. Things won’t ever quiet down, after this challenge there will be another one, we’re always going to be busy. But we keep telling ourselves that someday the right time will arrive and then we’ll be able to make the changes we need to make, to have the conversations we need to have, to create the business we want to be.
So start now. It will be hard. You will be busy. You will have to make some difficult decisions about how you spend your time. You will have to recognize that there are things that are taking your attention and your energy that shouldn’t be, and that you need to remove those things (or people) from your universe.
You may fail at first. You may fail a lot. That doesn’t mean you weren’t right to attempt to do what you thought needed to be done. Regroup and go at it again. Don’t let initial – or in some cases, repeated – failure stop you. If you are convinced that what you’re doing is right, then keep hammering away. Don’t just look for the easy button, because it doesn’t exist.
Look around your business. There are things you should be doing. There are things your people should be doing. There are critical, strategically important things that need to be done, but nobody’s doing them because it’s not the “right time”.
It is the right time. Make sure that you & everyone around you are doing the things that matter today and will matter tomorrow. Don’t wait until some imaginary “someday” when everything will be rainbows and unicorns and everything we touch will turn to gold. Get to work.
