What it costs to keep waiting

You know. Everyone does. When something’s not right in your life you’re aware of it. You might not show it outwardly, nor may you admit it conversationally, but you know. And where do we spend the vast majority of waking hours in that life?

At work.

There’s a difference between knowing something’s off, or not as it should be, and knowing exactly what the problem is. Let’s assume for the sake of conversation that you know what it is.

Why haven’t you fixed it yet?

You’re a reasonable and logical person and there has always been a really good and defensible reason not to address the problem. You’re too busy, it just wouldn’t make sense to tackle something new right now, we’ll tackle it next quarter, let’s get through tax season and then …

Are each of those perfectly plausible and understandable reasons to put something off? Of course they are. That’s why avoidance is so pernicious. Running a business provides a litany of fantastic reasons to avoid facing your problem head-on. Even outside the business world, the mind is incredibly skilled at coming up with great justifications for avoiding something uncomfortable.

But what is the cost?

You know the only real limited resource we have in life is time, so I don’t need to go down that path and wax poetic about how waiting to address a problem wastes precious time.

You know something isn’t right, and waiting implicitly means accepting that as okay.

The net effect could be spending another year charging 20-30% of what you’re worth. Another year doing a ton of networking but having zero business to show for it. Spending half of every day answering email and managing your own calendar. Bringing your laptop on vacation and excusing yourself from family events to take calls. Hiring and training people only to have them leave. Another year sacrificing your health and the most important relationships in your life. Another year of the same nonsense.

That is not okay. None of it is.

At some point the cost of staying the same exceeds the perceived cost of change. The discomfort. It’s not a gradual process either. For me, it took almost 20 years to look around and say “I can’t take this anymore. Something has to give and I’ll do whatever it takes.”

20 years.

I was unhappy for a very long time and while I could admit that, I wasn’t ready to face the uncertainty that awaited if I were to face reality. Until I was. I knew, but I wasn’t ready.

You know.

You’ve known for a while. You’ve probably known longer than you care to admit.

When will you be ready?

Hit reply or reach out, pull me aside when you see me, tell me what you’ve been meaning to address that keeps getting pushed out.