Why is There No Such Thing as a Perfect Time to Start Anything?

There is no such thing as a perfect time to start anything because the best time to start working towards a goal is always the present. You’re not sure what the future holds and if you’re waiting for the timing to be perfect you’re just procrastinating. It’s also likely going to be more difficult to start working towards your goals in the future as opposed to today. As you get older you’ll probably have less free time, more responsibilities and it will be more difficult to break bad habits. It’s better to put some effort towards your goals now rather than wait and hope your circumstances are better in the future.

Have you ever heard someone say, “I wish I started when I was older”?

No, and oftentimes the opposite is true. It takes time to develop a skill and become good enough at it to be a professional. The younger you are when you start working towards your goals the sooner you will reach them. For example, suppose your goal is to become a full-time YouTuber. It takes a lot of time to create a library of content and build a dedicated audience. You’re more likely to achieve this goal if you spend thirty minutes a day working towards it now as opposed to waiting to start six-months from now. In fact, if you put in thirty minutes of work each day for six-months that’s about ninety-one hours of work you would have done in the time you were sitting around waiting for everything to be perfect. Do you really believe the circumstances of your life six-months from now will be so much more favorable that even spending thirty minutes a day working towards your goal now is pointless? No, the sooner you start the sooner you will become successful.

You don’t know what the future will be like and therefore can’t wait for the “perfect time”

You may justify putting off working towards your goals to a later date because you know aspects of your life will soon change. You may be graduating from high school or college or moving to a new city. You may think you’ll have more time to start working towards your goals once your current circumstances change. Even if that’s true, the future is still unpredictable. You don’t know what your health will be like, if your family will have an emergency or if there will be a major shift in society. You may think things will be easier in the future but you can’t guarantee it. Therefore, it’s important to start working towards achieving your goals now.

You should start building the habits necessary to become successful as soon as possible.

The sooner you get into the habit of working towards your goal the easier it will be to maintain these habits. It’s easier to build on these habits once they’ve become second nature. This is what James Clear, the author of the book Atomic Habits, calls habit stacking. Let’s go back to the example of becoming a full-time YouTuber. The first step you take towards achieving this goal is spending thirty minutes per day working on creating videos. It takes a conscious effort to sit down and do this work at first, but after a couple months it gets easier and soon you’re able to do it without much effort. Eventually you want to be more productive, so you push yourself a little more and start spending an hour each day making videos. Then that becomes routine so you decide to spend four hours every Saturday making videos in addition to an hour each day and so on. You should take some action now in order to develop the habits you need to reach your goal and once those habits have become routine you can build on them.

There is no perfect time to start anything because the perfect time is always the present.
If the circumstances in the future are better than great! You’re already in the habit of working towards your goal and can spend more time harnessing your skills. If you’re wrong and the future is just as difficult, or more difficult, than your present you’re still better off starting earlier.