The Comfort of Waiting and the Cost of Doing Nothing.
You rarely notice it while it’s happening. One day, you simply look back and wonder how so much time slipped through your fingers. How years passed and nothing truly changed. How ten years went by and you are still standing in the same place, holding the same ideas, carrying the same dreams you once promised yourself you’d act on. The questions come quietly at first.
How did this happen?
When did I stop moving?
Why didn’t I start when I had the chance?
Then regret seeps in slowly, like rot. By the time you notice it, the damage has already been done. You begin to imagine what could have been. You wish you had started earlier. You wish you weren’t so afraid of failing. You wish you had confronted those limiting beliefs head-on instead of negotiating with them. You wish you had just acted; imperfectly and clumsily. Because after five or ten years, the truth becomes impossible to ignore: there was never a right time. There never was. “The right time” was an excuse in disguise. It always was.
Five years ago, if someone had told you this, you wouldn’t have believed them. You felt intentional. You were “putting things in place.” You had milestones you wanted to reach first. You told yourself you were being responsible. It sounded mature. Measured, calculated and wise.
And whenever someone said, “Just start,” you had a well-prepared response. You explained why now wasn’t the time. Why you weren’t ready yet. Why everything hadn’t aligned. Why starting now would be premature.
What you didn’t know, what you hadn’t realized at the time, was that your mind was quietly masking your fear. The careful, disciplined waiting you called wisdom wasn’t wisdom at all. It was fear in disguise: fear of failing in front of others, fear of being seen trying, fear of falling short of expectations, fear of starting as an unprofessional, fear of being a beginner, and fear of discovering that the thing you imagined so vividly might never work in reality.
So you waited.
And hours turned into days. Days into weeks. Weeks into months. Months into years. Slowly, almost invisibly, waiting stopped being a strategy and became a habit. Your confidence thinned. Self-trust eroded. Doubt took root and grew strong. What once felt exciting now felt heavy. Starting began to feel overwhelming.
Without realizing it, you trained yourself to delay, to be procrastinator. You perfected the art of explanation. You learned how to make inaction sound reasonable, safe, and sensible.
Have you noticed how every time you feel “not ready,” your mind immediately supplies beautiful reasons to support that feeling? Reasons that sound logical and convincing. Over time, those reasons become comfortable. You relax into them. You begin to live inside the pause, still chasing an imaginary future where everything is perfectly aligned.
That’s when you have now trained yourself to be comfortable. But the comfort comes at a cost.
Doing nothing rarely feels dangerous at first. So your life continues. Days pass. Nothing collapses. That’s what makes it deceptive. The damage isn’t a dramatic one, because it happens slowly. Skills don’t develop. Confidence doesn’t form. Opportunities don’t always disappear; they just stop knocking as loudly as they used to. You don’t fail. But you don’t grow either.
The longer you wait, the more familiar waiting becomes. It stops being a decision and turns into a way of life.
What I’m saying is simple: if you have an idea, start. I’m not saying you should start blindly. But carefully, without letting “calculation” become another excuse for inaction. Because too often, waiting to make a calculated move turns into making no move at all. And the longer you wait, the harder it becomes to begin.
The good news is this: once you become aware of what’s happening to you, you can always make an exit. You can always make a U-turn once you realize what waiting has done to you. It may be uncomfortable. It may be slower than you hoped. But it’s worth it.
Don’t let yourself become someone who is always waiting for the right time. The moment the idea appears is already a signal.
Start where you are. Move imperfectly and unapologetically.
Adjust as you go.
Written by Olivia Ezeani
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