You'll Never Be Ready

Preparation isn't preparation at all. It's procrastination dressed up in productive blows. I spent five years getting ready to start my podcast, my business. I spent five years reading every book on entrepreneurship. I was taking every course on marketing, on raising money, on reading content. I was planning every single detail of my future business and my future life. I would create these business plans, these elaborate spreadsheets. I draw wire frames. I do everything except start. And this wasn't just something that happened when I started my podcast. In fact, every single thing that I've ever done in my life, I spent an insane amount of time preparing for it. When I figured out that I finally wanted to start a podcast, I spent six months researching the perfect microphone. I studied content creation frameworks. I planned my content strategy down to the smallest detail. I have become, as many of us are, experts at almost starting a business. And a lot of us fall into this trap. We research. We study so much. We become this expert at starting a business, but never actually start. Meanwhile, our friend who barely graduated high school, he launched a pressure washing company with a $200 Craigslist machine and a beat up truck. And his first website looked like it was designed by a blind person. His pricing was all wrong. His customer service was amateur. His equipment kept breaking. But he had something that the pre start person doesn't have customers, real money coming in, real problems to solve, real feedback to iterate on. So while we're all perfecting the theoretical understanding of business, he was building an actual business. And now if we fast forward to today, that guy probably has three pressure washing crews and he just bought his second rental property. Meanwhile, a lot of us are still optimizing our business plans. See, this is a lie that we tell ourselves. There's a very uncomfortable truth that we have to face. Preparation isn't preparation at all. It is procrastination dressed up in productive clothes. See, every book I read, every course I took, every plan that I refined, it all feels like progress, right? I feel like I'm learning. I feel like I'm growing. I feel like I'm getting ready. But really, it's just avoiding the one thing that would actually move me forward starting, right? Now, the ancient Greeks had a word for this. It distinguished between theoria, which is contemplation and praxis, which is action. The Aristotle understood that while thinking about virtue is valuable, you only become virtuous by acting virtuously. See, you don't become an entrepreneur by studying entrepreneurship. Another example, you become a writer by writing badly, not by affecting your understanding of prose, right? You become confident by doing scary things, not by reading about confidence. You become anything by doing it badly first and then getting better. But our education system taught us the opposite. We learned to study first, then apply, master the theory, then attempt the practice. See, this works in school. This fails spectacularly in life. Now, why are we so seduced by preparations? See, preparation is seductive because it feels productive without requiring risk. When you're researching and planning and learning, you feel like you're making progress, you're busy, you're improving. You're being responsible in thorough, but you're not risking anything. You're not facing the possibility of failure and criticism. We're discovering that you don't know what you thought you knew. You're staying safe while feeling productive. It's a perfect drug. But there's something deeper happening here. Something way more sinister. See, preparation becomes a way of avoiding the fundamental terror of being responsible for your own existence because when you're preparing, you're not accountable for the results. You're still in this realm of potential, right? You haven't committed being the kind of person who builds a business or creates content or takes risk. You can still be anyone. You're scared because the moment you start, you begin the process of becoming someone specific, someone who succeeds or fails, someone who creates or doesn't, basically someone who matters or doesn't, right? And this specificity, this collapse from infinite potential in the concrete reality is what stresses people out. It just creates this existential source of human anxiety. There's a philosopher, Kierkegaard. He called this infinite reflection, thinking so much about what to do that you never actually do anything. He understood that at some point, all the analysis in the world becomes a substitute for actually living. But this infinite reflection, it isn't just intellectual paralysis. It is this existential cowardice. It is disguised as responsibility and prudence and preparation. It's really just choosing the safety of this internal potential over the danger of actually becoming something. Now, see, that guy we're speaking about at the beginning, who had the power washing, pressure washing business, right? What I learned about guys like that who build their business well, say, I'm just sitting on the sidelines just studying, perfecting my knowledge, waiting to start. Guys like that who just start and when they start, they start badly. But when they start badly, it gives them something that no amount of preparation can provide. Contact with reality. Not the sanitized theoretical reality that you read about in books, courses. It's the messy, unforgiving, immediate reality. It doesn't care about your plans, right? That contact with reality versus your theoretical preparation, it creates two very different kinds of knowledge, right? So your theoretical preparation, your studying, your reading, your courses, that knowledge comes from thinking about the world. But what you really need is knowledge that comes from engaging with the world. See, when you go out and do something, when you start badly, when you're that guy that starts to pressure wash your business, you are actually trying to change the world. You're trying to create something that didn't exist before. And when you try and change the world or you try and create in the world, the world pushes back. It tells you where your ideas are wrong. It shows you gaps in your assumptions and it shows you reality. It teaches you things that no amount of thinking and studying preparation could ever teach you. The real customers are telling you what they actually want, not what you think they want. Real problems will force you to develop real solutions. Real constraints will spark real creativity and real feedback will teach you faster than any book ever could. So when that pressure washer breaks down mid job, he doesn't have time to research the optimal replacement. He has to figure it out immediately or he loses a customer. And that crisis taught him more about equipment in one afternoon than I would learn in six months of reading reviews and speculation and podcasts, right? But more than that, it teaches the person who starts badly, who they are under pressure. It teaches the person who starts badly that they can solve problems that they would have never anticipated. It teaches the person who starts badly that the difference between theoretical knowledge and practical wisdom. So every challenge that you face when you start badly teaches you about business and about yourself. But if you stay in preparation mode, you learn about business in the abstract, whereas the people that actually just start, they really just discover what kind of entrepreneur and person they are. And reality is the harshest teacher, but it's also the most honest. So every day that you spend preparing is a day that you are not discovering who you actually are when it matters. And the cruel irony of over preparation is that it actually makes you less prepared for what matters. You become prepared for the hypothetical world that you've imagined in your research, but the real world is nothing like that. See, that pressure washer wasn't prepared for his equipment to break down constantly, but he learned to fix it. He wasn't prepared for customers to demand a service that he'd never offered, but he figured it out. He wasn't prepared for these seasonal fluctuations in demand, but he adapted, right? And if you just study, you're prepared for none of these things because you can't prepare for problems that you've never experienced. You can only develop the ability to solve problems as they come up as you deal with them in real life. And that ability, it just comes from dealing with the actual problem, facing the actual problem. See, people think that just starting is careless. It means that you're not putting enough thought into it, but I'm here to tell you that starting badly doesn't mean starting carelessly. It means starting before you feel ready. It means prioritizing the speed of learning over preparation of planning. It means choosing feedback from reality over feedback from books. And when you actually start as opposed to just prepare, this is what happens. Week one, everything breaks, you feel stupid, you want to quit. Week two, you fix some things, you realize what you don't know and you start learning what matters because now you have contact with reality. Month one, you're still terrible, but you're terrible at the right things instead of being perfect at the wrong things. Month three, you're competent at the basics, and you understand your real problems, and you know what, you have to go learn next. Month six, you're better than most people who are still preparing, and then year one, you've lapped everyone who's still getting ready. Meanwhile, their preparers are still preparing. So what I want you to take away from today, outside of the fact, you just got to start is to start asking yourself different questions that will help you start now. So instead of asking yourself, am I ready? Start to ask yourself what's the fastest way to get feedback from reality? Instead of asking yourself, what if I fail? Start asking yourself what will teach me the most fastest? And instead of asking yourself, how do I avoid mistakes? Start to ask yourself, how do I make mistakes faster so I can learn faster? Remember, the goal isn't to avoid failure. The goal is to fail faster than your competition is learning. So if I could go back to my younger self, what I would say before I stressed about starting anything is maybe read one book, then start, take one course, then launch, make one plan, then begin. Let reality teach you what you actually need to know. Let the customers tell you what they actually want. Let problems show you what skills actually matter. Let the market correct your assumptions before they become elaborate theories. The person who starts badly today will beat the person who prepares perfectly for years, not because preparation is useless, but because the best preparation is practice. See, the water doesn't care if you study swimming. It only cares if you can swim. So at one point, you got to jump in, right? Now, whatever you're dealing with right now in your life, whatever business you want to start, whatever move you want to make, whatever you've been preparing for, you're ready enough, not perfectly ready, not even completely ready, not as ready as you'd like to be, but ready enough because ready enough plus starting beats perfectly prepared plus waiting every single time.