“Nobody ever got ready by waiting. You only get ready by starting.”

A thought by John C Maxwell, (2012-10-02) from his book, The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth: Live Them and Reach Your Potential (p. 32). Center Street. Kindle Edition.

I was sitting the other day with a friend who wanted to talk about blogging.  She was excited about doing it; she even said she had six  set up.  So I asked when she was going to start and she said, “Oh I’m not ready yet.  It has to be perfect.”

I was walking the other day to my Starbucks for my morning coffee and I walked by the Pasadena Playhouse and I saw that they were having auditions all that day for the play, Sleepless in Seattle.  As soon as I got to Starbucks I told a barista there about it.  I knew she had moved from Virginia to LA to become an actress.   I thought she would be excited and jump at the opportunity but she said, “I can’t do that.  I’m not ready.”  And I thought about the potential contacts she could have had if she would have just tried and she might have even gotten the part.

I’m not real sure of how many of the things that I started I was really ready to do, probably none of them.  I’m not sure that Margaret and I were really ready to be married but we did it and we are still doing it now 38+ years later.  I know I wasn’t really ready to be a parent but God blessed Margaret and I with Brett and Stefanie and now they are married, Brett to Marissa and Stef to Andrew and they have given us Ashlyn, Addison and our newest one, Harper.  And I know that none of them thought they were really ready to be married or to be parents.  But they have become exceptional at both because they started before they were ready.

I know I got cold feet when I was young to become a preacher.  My dad got me up to preach when I was sixteen and it didn’t go real well.  I wasn’t ready and I wasn’t ready until I was over 30.  All of those wasted years because I thought I wasn’t ready.  But one day I said, I going to do it no matter what and I did it for the next 30+ years and I’m still doing it now through my blogs. 

Now there is a lot of work to be done in getting better at whatever it is you started.  But you have to start and you will always find there is a risk in starting anything but there is no other way to get really ready without starting.  Yes, it’s not going to be perfect but you just need to try.  It is in doing that you really find out what it takes to do it and to get better and better at it.  It is also in doing it that you find out it may not be what you are supposed to be doing.  But you wouldn’t know that either if you hadn’t started.

Somewhere you have to try your dreams out by getting started.  You may fail in the beginning but if it is what you were built to do you won’t stop, you’ll keep trying until it happens, but you have to start.

So what is it you are afraid to start doing because you aren’t ready?