Hippie CEO Life #26 - Go before You Feel Ready
October 7, 2022
Sometimes you just have to go before you feel ready.
A few weeks ago, my youngest son decided he wanted to learn how to ride a bike. And so he did. He spent the rest of that day, riding up and down the street, learning how to turn, learning how to stop.
The next day, he decided he was ready to learn how to take jumps. And so he did.
i asked him how it went and he said, “it was really awesome right until I landed on my face.”
After thinking about it a bit more, thinking about what happened, what went wrong, he was ready for the jump again.
As a parent, i’m thinking, “just slow down, you literally just learned how to ride a bike yesterday, we don’t need to think about taking jumps for another year or two.”
However, as a creator, as a business owner, i guess i understand his desire to perhaps go a little earlier than the rest of us think is wise.
Thinking back through past business plans, projects, ideas, there tends to be this nagging voice in my head, i’m sure many of our heads, that says:
We need more experience
We need to do more research
We need to do more planning
We just don’t know enough yet
And so we think and plan and think some more and then sadly, we never attempt the jump.
i need to be clear that i am not suggesting that we just haul off and do whatever new idea comes into our mind without thinking, without analyzing, without planning, i’m not suggesting that at all, however i am suggesting that after we have done all of those things it will probably still feel scary and so it’s up to us to say, i don’t feel ready but i’m going to go anyway.
…
In the early years of Omniture, there was a hallway that had framed screenshots of different versions of the Omniture homepage hung, in chronological order, on the wall. The earliest versions of the page were beyond laughable, the designs so classic, late 90’s cringe.
But i found myself walking this hallway often as a reminder that what we see as the current state of our favorite artists, brands, etc. isn’t anything like the way things looked years, decades ago. They all went before they felt ready, probably a little embarrassed about how their first few versions look through today’s lens but they went and they made a real positive difference in the world.
…
i’m sure that if we take some time to think about it, we all have many examples of going before we felt ready, of brands that we admire that did the same, yet it feels like we still need to remind ourselves often that after we have properly prepared, we may still need a little bit of a push to go because we just don’t feel ready.
“It was awesome right up until I landed on my face, and even that was awesome!”
