Those who wait
And those who don’t.
I recently came across a quote I liked.
You can just do things. You don’t need to be ready. You don’t need to be qualified. You don’t need to know everything.
All you need is to decide. To commit. To learn as you go. Key word “go.” There is no perfect plan, no perfect time, no perfect anything.
The world is divided into those who wait, and those who don’t.
The world is divided into those who wait and those who don’t.
Those who wait tend to fail. Those who don’t, fare better.
Hesitation delays an encounter with life, which retards learning. Waiting slows progress. Waiting is death.
The heart of the problem then is delaying when speed is required. The solution is to not delay.
Start
Getting started doesn’t mean zero planning. Some planning is useful. But planning isn’t doing. Only doing is doing.
Many of us procrastinate. We need more information, more time, more options. There is so much still to organize and consider. We feel unprepared so we do nothing.
Procrastination is difficult because it is often based on a seemingly rational analysis. It feels plausible to wait for more information or more resources.
But we usually learn in life most projects don’t work as planned and the mishaps were unknowable beforehand. Most planning, then, seems to be of limited value. It is guesswork.
As we invest in the plan, emotionally and otherwise, it becomes harder to let go. Much better to minimize this investment to begin with. To jump in at an earlier stage. To get started sooner.
Thinking versus doing
The higher the intelligence the more likely someone is to hesitate and wait. Plans take on lives of their own. This is especially true for elaborate plans.
It is more common in those who can create detailed plans in the first place as not everyone can. Hesitation, then, is often a disease of the clever, the most intellectually able. Which is why accomplishment is not limited to them, nowhere near it.
He who hesitates is lost, and some hesitate for a whole lifetime, struggling to imagine where the doers get their confidence from.
The answer is they jump before they are ready. They don’t reflect on their confidence much. They don’t think like that at all.
Their default is to leap, not to overthink. It is easy to dismiss them as nonthinking, but it is more accurate to class them as doers. Their default is action not planning, thinking or dreaming.
They discover at some point they learn best by doing. So they do things, perhaps unprepared, and fail. Their confidence comes from surviving the failures and understanding failing is not so bad.
Unknowable futures
For those with good imaginations the reasons to delay are legion. They need more information, time or money.
This feels like the wrong moment because the economy is turbulent, the weather is lousy or we are due a solar eclipse. The omens are always poor if you look hard enough.
There are many excellent reasons to do nothing because the future is unknowable. Anything can happen, including the calamities we conjure up in our minds.
But most of those never happen. Most worries are unfounded.
The advantage, therefore, goes to the underthinkers, the ones who probably think too little and jump too fast. They don’t take the time to imagine excellent reasons to not proceed. So they don’t not proceed accordingly and over time accomplish more.
Comfort
Most planning is reassurance, not preparation. Reassurance is not really possible up front unless you are clairvoyant. That is why planning feels great. It is the closest we get to comforting ourselves with something when the outcome is unknowable.
It can be a lot of effort based on faulty reasoning. But it can feel useful.
The way forward is to have confidence in your ability to course correct as you go. Line up as much as you can, then jump, and understand the main skill to cultivate is the ability to adapt, not the forward planning.
The more you do this the more confident you get. Once you have a few dozen unplannable things appear from nowhere and wreck your grand schemes which you somehow survive, then you begin to appreciate the skill is really in dusting yourself off and moving on, not avoiding calamity.
Everyone gets stung eventually. Resilience is created through exposure not avoidance.
Feet first
Planning as reassurance is a kind of addiction. We do it because it feels good.
Even when it fails, cognitive distortions help prevent us drawing correct conclusions; spending all that time on a plan was of low value. We should have failed quicker by trying after a brief period of minimal preparation.
The restraint needed to avoid overplanning is a skill worth cultivating. Many never do this of course. They don’t feel the need to develop it.
But some do and the fastest way to scale back a tendency to overplan is to do more, to override the urge for another pass of the plan by getting to work.
Most already know what they need to do for a project or goal. Their hesitation is fear; fear of failure, fear of making a fool of themselves, fear of it not quite being perfect.
It is a focus on the unknown. This thing is not fully predictable.
But thinking about it harder doesn’t make it any less unknown. Only acting on the world does that.
Life is an experience, it demands to be lived in real time. Get to it. Resolve to plan less and do more. Move quicker.
And remember, the world is divided into those who wait, and those who don’t. So don’t.
Viewed from the perspective of an HSP, planning has never interfered with or prevented action but is simply its wise precursor.
"From an evolutionary perspective, being highly sensitive has its advantages. Historically, individuals with Sensory Processing Sensitivity may have acted as the tribe’s “early warning system,” detecting subtle signs of danger before others. These heightened perceptual abilities could have been crucial in survival scenarios, allowing for early detection of predators or changes in the environment. It seems likely that a balanced mix of highly sensitive and less sensitive individuals would be most beneficial for a group’s survival. Highly sensitive individuals could pick up on subtle changes and threats, while less sensitive individuals could undertake riskier tasks without becoming overwhelmed."
Speaking as a teacher, learning by doing is a good method that's been bastardised into "let the kids decide for themselves what they're to be doing". When done right it is of course much different:
The one who knows, shows the student.
The student tries it himself.
The teacher corrects, advises and as needed shows again.
The student tries repeatedly, with the teacher noting what needs improving.
The student keeps repeating until task is mastered.
Those five lines, which can be further simplified, is the sum total of the field of pedagogy, but since such simplicity and clarity makes for poor business models, it needs clouding and swaddling into tens of thousands of pages of hypoteses and theories.
Another thing to always consider is, what the brain does it gets better at doing until the doing becomes second nature. Thus, if you're allowed as a child to procrastinate, rationalise your way out of things and to postpone or be delinquent without unpleasant cost and consewuence, you get very good at not doing things/having to do things.
Which very bad for you as an adult, but by then you perceive things as natural, despite feeling forlorn, depressed and alienated without really understanding why.
Not doing something must always be a conscious choice, made with full understanding of the cost, instead of an automatic or autonomous rote response.
I could go for days repeating platitudes, because this *thing* you've written about is so simple it takes a lot of words to nail it down.