On Being Ready

This piece from Isabel really speaks to my present state.

In it, she approaches the question that both she and I ask ourselves: "am I ready?"

By interrogating this question each time it comes up, I've realized that this elusive, rather mysterious notion of "being ready" might just be the most well-disguised psychological block of all time. It's this idea that one day, you will receive a magical stamp of approval, delivered directly to you by some mysterious external force, telling you that you are now Ready For The Thing.

I turned 30 two weeks ago, and since then I have been spending a lot of my time thinking about what I want to accomplish in the next ten years. There are a lot of things I want to do, but I can feel myself blocked by this exact sensation of not feeling "ready" to embark on any of them.

Even coming up with a list of long-term goals has proved somewhat difficult, as I find it hard to nail down the specifics of which things I want to start focusing on right now. While I doubt that this solely originates from a feeling of unreadiness, I do think that evaluating ideas through the lens of "am I ready to commit to this?" when deciding whether they belong on my list of "Goals for the Next 10 Years" is not doing me any favors.

This invisible, poorly defined prerequisite began to block me from doing things I felt deeply called to but had never done before, because I felt like I couldn't do them until I achieved some unidentifiable hurdle indicating I would succeed. The problem was: this ready-ness prerequisite didn't actually exist.

The "unidentifiable" qualifier here is quite load-bearing. When I feel like I'm not "ready" to do something, it's generally not attached to some quantifiable criterion of what "ready" would look like. It's more hand-wavy and vibes-based; an "I'll know it when I see it" kind of feeling that allows putting off a task into the indeterminate future.

I have tried to write about many things these last few weeks, but I have discarded all of them, because—I told myself—the pieces weren't "ready" or I wasn't "ready" to write them.

There are many half-written pieces sitting in my drafts that have fallen into this exact trap. I'll have an idea for an article, start writing it, only to get stuck partway through.

Typically this stems from discovering that the article in my head requires more something to achieve—more research, more examples, more eloquence—that I don't feel ready to give it in that moment.

If you keep waiting for permission from some external source long after anyone is responsible for giving it to you, your ideas and ambitions will [wither] while you become bitter that no one is letting you do what you wanted to do. But in the end: it's your responsibility to give yourself permission.

This waiting for permission is an interesting one for me. In my day job, I have no problem taking initiative and doing what needs to get done without waiting for specific permission or directive from anyone to do it. But when it comes to doing things for myself, I find it much harder.

I think part of this is that, within the context of work, there is already some level of blanket permission that has been granted in order for me to do my job.

To give a concrete example, I've been mulling over buying a walking pad for my desk so that I can be a bit less stationary while working. I've been considering this for probably over six months at this point, and yet have still not managed to pull the trigger on it. Why is that?

Is it because I don't feel I'm "ready"? To do the research before selecting a particular model? To spend the money? To incorporate a change into my work environment?

Recognizing that the permission has to come from inside myself really puts a different spin on it. Viewed in that way, it becomes painfully obvious that I'm the only thing standing between me and something that would arguably be a big boon to my physical health.

So, the next time you find yourself wondering if you're ready: don't. Instead: start. We become ready by trying, not by thinking.