I’m 37. I run multiple websites read by tens of millions of people, I wrote a book about Buddhism, I built something that didn’t exist when I started, and I still catch myself, more often than I’d like to admit, waiting.
Waiting for clarity. Waiting for a better moment. Waiting for someone more qualified to tell me it’s okay to proceed. Waiting for a version of myself that feels ready.
At some point in the last year or so, I got tired enough of this pattern to actually look at it honestly. And here’s what I found when I did: the waiting isn’t wisdom. It’s a habit. And it’s costing me more than I knew.
Three things I’ve had to learn the hard way, and keep re-learning, in no particular order.
Nobody is coming to save you
I grew up with a vague sense that if I was good enough, worked hard enough, and kept my head down, something or someone would eventually recognize it and step in. A mentor would appear. An opportunity would open. The right door would unlock itself if I just stayed patient.
That is a fantasy, and it’s one that kept me passive for longer than it should have.
What psychology actually tells us is that the people who tend to get where they want to go share one defining trait: they believe, fundamentally, that their outcomes are in their own hands. Psychologist Julian Rotter first identified this in the 1950s as locus of control, the degree to which a person believes their own actions, rather than external forces, determine what happens to them. Research consistently shows that people with an internal locus of control perform better professionally, experience better mental health, and report higher life satisfaction.
That’s not because the universe rewards internal thinkers. It’s because they don’t wait for someone else to act first.
I didn’t fully grasp this in my 20s. I operated with something closer to an external locus of control without realising it. I believed that doing good work was the job, and that the system would handle the rest. The system, it turns out, doesn’t notice unless you make it notice. Nobody is sitting around with a spreadsheet tracking your effort and quietly arranging for you to be rewarded for it. You have to want the thing clearly enough to go get it yourself.
That shift, from waiting to be found to actively moving toward what you want, is one of the more important ones I’ve made.
Nobody is keeping score
This one cut deeper when I finally saw it.
For years I operated under the assumption that there was some kind of ledger. That all the sacrifices I made, the times I stayed quiet when I should have spoken, the things I didn’t pursue because it wasn’t the right time, were being recorded somewhere. That eventually the balance would settle in my favour.
It’s not. There is no ledger.
The time you didn’t take the risk because you wanted to be responsible isn’t stored anywhere waiting to be redeemed. The energy you spent being cautious and considered and measured isn’t accumulating interest. The version of yourself you kept on hold because conditions weren’t perfect is just… on hold.
I think about this in the context of Buddhist philosophy a lot. One of the core teachings I keep returning to is the idea that clinging, whether to outcomes, to fairness, to the expectation that things should balance out, is a source of suffering. The universe isn’t a transaction. It doesn’t owe you anything for your restraint, and it’s not punishing you for your boldness. It’s just responding to what you actually do.
Researchers who study procrastination have called it an existentially relevant problem, because at its core it isn’t really about tasks. It’s about not getting on with life itself. The researcher Timothy Pychyl of Carleton University describes chronic delay as a self-inflicted wound that chips away at the most valuable resource in the world: time. And unlike most things that get spent, time doesn’t replenish. Nobody is keeping your unused time in an account for later.
The version of the life I was waiting for permission to start has been available this whole time. I just kept telling myself the timing was off.
The life you’re waiting to start is already passing
A few years ago I came across the work of Bronnie Ware, a palliative care nurse who spent years with people in the last weeks of their lives, recording what they said when there was nothing left to perform and no version of the future left to plan for.
The single most common regret she documented, reported by her patients again and again, was this: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
Not I wish I’d worked more. Not I wish I’d been more careful. I wish I’d had the courage.
The people who said this weren’t talking about dramatic gestures. They were talking about the small, recurring moments where they knew what they actually wanted and chose the safer, more expected thing instead. They did it enough times that the life they were actually living and the life they had imagined drifted so far apart they could never quite close the gap.
I’m 37. I am nowhere near that moment. But I’m close enough to understand, in a way I couldn’t at 27, that the gap opens gradually. It doesn’t announce itself. You make one cautious choice, and another, and another, and each one feels entirely reasonable in the moment. And then one day you look up and you’ve built a very sensible, very defensible life that doesn’t quite feel like yours.
I’ve built things I’m genuinely proud of. Hack Spirit has reached hundreds of millions of readers. The work we do at Brown Brothers Media matters to the people who read it. My book on Buddhism is sitting on people’s shelves in countries I’ve never been to. None of that came from waiting for the right conditions. It came from starting before I was ready, shipping before it was perfect, and trusting that the doing was more valuable than the planning.
And still, I catch myself at the door. Deciding whether I’m ready. Waiting for the feeling that I have enough permission or enough certainty or enough evidence that it’s going to work.
Here’s what I’ve come to understand: that feeling doesn’t arrive before you start. It arrives, if it arrives at all, after. You don’t get confidence and then act. You act and sometimes, not always but sometimes, confidence shows up later like it was never in doubt.
What I’m actually trying to do about it
I’m not going to pretend I’ve solved this. Anybody who tells you they’ve fully overcome the pull toward comfort and delay is either unusually wired or not being straight with you.
What I try to do is notice the waiting and name it honestly. Not as patience, not as prudence, not as strategic thinking, but as hesitation. Sometimes hesitation is correct. Often it’s just fear wearing a reasonable disguise.
The question I’ve started asking myself when I’m stalling is: who am I waiting for? What am I expecting to happen that isn’t happening? What does the best version of this situation look like if I act now with what I have, rather than later with something I don’t have yet?
Most of the time, the honest answer is that I’m waiting for certainty I’m never going to get. I’m waiting for someone to tell me it’s okay. I’m waiting to feel ready, which is its own kind of trap, because readiness doesn’t precede doing. It follows it.
My Buddhist practice keeps pointing me back to the same thing: this moment is the only one that actually exists. The one where you’re prepared will probably never arrive exactly as imagined. The life you’re designing in your head while standing at the door is not the same as the one you’ll build by walking through it.
I’m 37. I know enough now to know I don’t know very much. But I know this: the moment I stopped waiting for someone to hand me permission, and started acting as if I already had it, was the moment things actually started moving.
You already have the permission. You’ve had it this whole time. The question is whether you’re going to use it.
