If you planted a garden in a day, you wouldn’t know if you were successful for a year or more. If you wrote a novel today, and it was the most amazing book of the century, it still wouldn’t reach a bookstore shelf for a year or more.
You are not going to write the best book of the century on your first try. You are not going to plant the perfect garden in your first spring.
When I was younger, I planned things for my retirement. I would tend to plants. I would return to the writing of my youth. I would build all the things that, through a lifetime of accumulated wisdom, I had learned to construct. I was waiting. I was wrong.
There are so many inspirational quotes about not waiting:
"You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today." — Abraham Lincoln
"Your future is created by what you do today, not tomorrow." — Robert Kiyosaki
"The future starts today, not tomorrow." — Pope John Paul II
"Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin." — Mother Teresa
There is hope in all of them, but I want to add a tinge of cloud to those silver linings with facts:
I have been gardening for about six years now, and my garden is still quite incomplete and imperfect. Plants struggle where I place them. They crowd each other out, grow in different patterns than planned, and don’t always like my soil. They lose the fight against weeds I thought I had defeated, and they need more or less sun than I expected. I am a repeatedly failing gardener. While that is half the fun of the task, I know now that if I had waited, I would have achieved nothing.
In the last few years, I have written nine books. Three are so bad I am embarrassed to have penned them. Three are not terrible, and three, according to my beta readers, might be approaching decent. I have had to learn how to write, how to craft query letters for agents, and how to distill 100,000 words into a 1,000-word synopsis that convinces someone to read more. I am years away from any breakthrough moment, and even after that "yes," I am still more time away from seeing a book on a shelf.
If I had waited, I wouldn’t have had enough time. I don’t know that I have it now. Don’t wait. Don’t assume you’ll have time someday. You won’t. Take the time today.
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