Don’t wait until you’re ready. You’ll never be ready. Just do it!

A common piece of advice masquerading as wisdom. I get why people give it, and I often agree. We really do postpone things, waiting for the perfect moment that never comes. Want to learn how to code - start coding. Afraid of public speaking - get on stage; it’ll be scary, but you’ll do it.

But I think that sometimes this advice is dangerous. I think we’re mixing up two very different kinds of readiness.

Readiness as competence vs. readiness as maturity

The first is about skills. You don’t know how to do something yet, but you can learn along the way. You google, make mistakes, try again. This gap really does get closed through action. The more you do, the better you get.

The second is about something else entirely. About how your thinking is structured. How much complexity you’re able to hold in your head. How much responsibility you can take on. At what level you’re even thinking about the problem.

And this second kind of readiness - you can’t just acquire it through action. You have to grow into it. Like a tree grows—gradually, when the conditions are right.

What this looks like in practice

At my previous job, I wasn’t ready to be responsible for the team’s financial results.

Not in the sense of “I didn’t know how to calculate metrics” - that can be figured out or googled, and I literally had to do that, the very “just do it!” part. But it made very little sense, because for me it was a formal exercise that didn’t influence the decisions I made. I was quite literally thinking at a different level, on a different scale. I saw my own tasks, my own work, and I did it well at the level available to me - but I didn’t see how it all added up to the team’s financial outcome, or why that was my responsibility.

A few months passed, I started a new job, and suddenly it turns out that this readiness is there. What changed? Not knowledge. Not skills. The way of thinking - its structure, how I make decisions. It’s like I grew into it.

Why this feels important to me

When someone tells us to “just start” without clarifying what kind of readiness they mean, I’m wary of that advice.

If you lack competence - yes, start, just jump in. You’ll learn along the way.

But if you lack maturity and you jump anyway - you might crash. Because it’s not that you “just don’t know how yet”. You’re thinking in the wrong categories. You don’t see what needs to be seen. And this is where I get stuck. Can you learn these things deliberately? How do you tell one gap from the other? And can maturity be accelerated, or will the garden only grow when it grows? I don’t know yet. I’ll keep thinking.