Do the thing before you’re ready to do the thing
Waiting for a train to go
or a bus to come, or a plane to go
or the mail to come, or the rain to go
or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow
or the waiting around for a Yes or No
or waiting for their hair to grow.
Everyone is just waiting.
-Dr. Seuss
I consider myself a very special blend of procrastinator, overthinker and perfectionist. Which makes starting things very difficult. I make excuses, come up with logical objections and resort to checklists of things that need to be done BEFORE I can start. Checklists are a big thing for me. Too big of a thing. Don't worry, I'm working on it. Right after I knock out a couple of prerequisites first…
I’ve had thoughts of building a site to house a gallery and trying to sell some prints of my photos for a while now. But I always had a lot of reasons why I wasn’t ready. I needed some more high quality images first to have a fully fleshed out portfolio. I needed to find the right printer to deliver high quality product. I needed to research what others were charging and understand what I should charge. None of these things were untrue, but they were convenient. Those are fairly sizable items to tackle and so it was OK that I wasn’t getting started on a website. I had a a completely justifiable, logical argument for waiting. That’s my trap. That’s what prevents me from moving forward with things I want to move forward. Or at least things I say I want to move forward. I have this tidy little explanation that nobody could fault me for because it’s understandable why I would want to knock out X, Y and Z before I get started.
I was at risk of pulling this same trick for my road trip. I had a laundry list of things I felt I should do before I committed myself to a month or more on the road. A June trip turned into a July trip which turned into an August trip, because “I should really have whatever taken care of before I take off”. As I often do, I caught myself doing this. I realized what it was and how easily I could explain away why the road trip hadn’t happened yet. And I could picture myself a year from now, sitting at a table with someone having a beer explaining how close I’d come to really doing it. But this time, I said screw that. I wasn’t going to make excuses for something that had really excited me, that would challenge me and, I hoped, do me some good. That night I built out a rough sketch of what the trip might look like, with ideas for where I’d go and how long it would take. A week after that I went and looked at my first van. A week after that I bought one and drove it a couple hundred miles back home. Two weeks after that, I left for my trip.
Did deciding to plow forward despite some concerns allow me to check off all of those items I wanted to complete before I left? No, it did not. It turns out I was right about one thing: there wasn’t enough time to do the trip in August. But I’m typing this from the middle of Utah, nearly 3 weeks into a trip I wasn’t ready for. Because what I realized was, even if the list was legit, maybe it wasn’t all absolutely necessary to take the next step and do the thing. Only one of the fog lights on my van works. The wire relay needed to be replaced and my local dealer couldn’t get it before my departure date. So I don’t have fog lights. Would they have been nice a couple of times? Sure. Necessary? I’ve made it this far without them. I had really wanted to take my van camping close to home so I could familiarize myself with things like the electrical system, emptying the gray water, filling the potable water, get used to using the propane stovetop. But I simply didn’t have time before the date I wanted to leave. So you know what? I got familiar with it on the road. There were a hundred small things that I had on my list that I didn’t do. My windshield wiper fluid sprayer doesn’t work on my van. I have no idea why, it just doesn’t. I didn’t understand rules for dispersed camping on BLM. I hadn’t even attempted to use some of the apps on my phone I considered critical to making my way across the country and finding places for drinking water, propane fillups, camping spots, etc. I have zero spare fuses onboard as backups in the event something pops one of the existing ones. I did basically zero research about the many national parks I wanted to visit, so I wouldn’t know what was worth seeing, how to see it and whether I needed reservations to get in. And yet…here I am.
Something this trip has reminded me of is that I’m a fast learner. So I picked up on a lot of “van life” essentials after just a few days. At this point in the trip I never know where I’m going to be spending the night until about 30 minutes before I’m parked there. The other thing I realized is that when you’re put in a situation you’re not prepared for, you just figure it out. Because you have to, it’s as simple as that. So, yeah, I’ll be pissed at myself for a minute if a fuse blows and my refrigerator stops working. But I’ll just find a fuse somewhere. Because I won’t have a choice. And if I can’t, then some food will go bad. I won’t die, there are restaurants and grocery stores on every street corner in America. I think I often inflate the consequences of things, I couldn’t tell you why. But most of the time, the stakes are really not that high and I’m holding myself back for no reason.
So it is with this website. It’s not perfect. I wanted it to look better. Have more stuff. Allow purchases. But it exists. That’s the hard part. I began and now I’ll learn as I go and I’ll get it the rest of the way there. Maybe you have something you’ve been waiting to do. Something you’ve been putting off. If you do, I would encourage you to just take the first step. Even if you don’t feel ready. Especially if you don’t feel ready, because you can mostly make it up as you go and you’ll be forced to learn and grow in the process. I don’t know what your thing is, but I’d be willing to bet the cost of failure is pretty insignificant in the grand scheme of things. So stop waiting, all of those objections are still going to be there when you come back to it. The only difference will be the time you lost that could have been spent working your way through them.