“Don’t wait until you’re ready because you’ll never be ready.” That’s a pretty common saying meant to encourage people to act sooner rather than later and to avoid giving up on their dreams. While there are some parts of life in which it works well, overall, I believe it’s better to wait until you’re ready. Here’s why.
For one thing, rushing into something can make you give up on it because it seems like you’ll never get it. This applies to anything that takes lots of time, practice, patience, and perhaps even some teaching from someone who knows how to do it. Giving it a go without any idea of how to do it can make it seem impossible; even learning later on that there are ways to learn it might still have come too little, too late for those who threw themselves into it and fell flat on their faces. In contrast, going slowly and taking things one step at a time can give you enough small, early victories to provide you with inspiration, hope, confidence, and a path to success with any endeavor.
An easy example of the danger of rushing is trying to lift way more weight than you are capable of lifting. Don’t try to lift 1,000 pounds if you can’t even lift 100 pounds. That’s a great way to fail, get injured, and get set back so much that you might never accomplish your goals in the weight room; you might even end up weaker than when you started. Just like in life, it’s better to start with what you can do and gradually increase once you’re ready for each new level.
I have plenty of experience with both waiting until I was ready for something and also rushing into it long before I was ready. For the first 5 or so years of my juggling journey, I just tried to brute-force everything I wanted to learn instead of coming up with a plan, seeking instruction, or anything of the sort. My approach to learning was throw things in the air until they didn’t hit the ground, and I paid no mind to technique as I hadn’t yet learned that good jugglers are good at throwing, not catching. As a result, lots of bad technique got ingrained into my muscle memory and made everything much harder than it could have been. To this day, I still have issues with many things in juggling because of the poor foundation from rushing into it early on. I wish I had focused more on good juggling technique from the start and often wonder how much better my juggling would be today if that’s the path I had taken.
In contrast, unicycling is a major area in which I’ve taken things step by step (or pedal by pedal, if you will). Along with getting pointers from folks who could already unicycle well, I dedicated most of my first year of unicycling to simply learning how to ride it. Once that became fairly comfortable, I learned how to ride while juggling, free mount, ride backwards a bit, idle, and a few other tricks I’ve picked up. Each one of these skills came when I was ready for them, and I was in no rush to learn them as quickly as possible or have them down by a certain arbitrary date. That allowed me to make steady progress that gradually came quicker and has gotten me to a decent skill level at this point. I’m glad I took that approach with unicycling, and I’m especially glad I didn’t try to ride a giraffe unicycle until I had great control and comfort with a normal unicycle.
As I’ve mentioned in at least one other post, I’ve been gradually changing and winding down certain routines I developed to help me heal after my dog Sawyer’s death. I didn’t make any major changes until I had healed enough that I could feel mostly good rather than extremely upset about making those changes. I also decided to make those changes myself instead of seeking anyone else’s opinion on what to do. Being able to confidently act of my own choosing has always been a sign that I’m ready for whatever I decide to do.
The idea of waiting until you’re ready might be hard for you to accept. All the messages about diving headfirst into everything make it difficult to think about doing otherwise. It took me a long time to realize that that’s how I’ve found success in nearly every area of my life. Whether or not you decide to do this is entirely up to you. If you do wind up accepting, I hope it works as well for you as it has for me, and that you start practicing it when you’re ready.