Perfectionism is insecurity’s favorite mask and it is keeping you from achieving.
I do not think now is the right time to ___________. I have said it, I bet you have said it and even worse I bet you have heard someone say it to you. The truth is… it does not ever seem like the right time to start anything.
Any big change in your life has a “high risk’’ probability and a seemingly low chance of succeeding.
However… anything that has a probability of a large reward always comes with a certain level of high risk. This is exactly why not everyone is a successful entrepreneur, an author, a creative professional, an astronaut, doctor… the list goes on.
Think about any “dream job” and you can be assured that there is a large amount of risk associated with making the decision to pursue that career.
We can use my own experience for this example. I am 35 and I am a freelance film maker/photographer. I only include photography because I thought I wanted to have a “real estate photography and cinematic home tour” business when I started freelancing. It turns out that I mostly hate taking photos professionally and I kinda suck at real estate everything. I could have gotten better, but I hated it. The take away here is that I only know how much I hate it because I tried it.
When I got my first DSLR and I started telling people about my ideas to freelance almost everyone said things to me like, “everyone is a photographer, the market is saturated, so on and so forth”. They were not wrong, the market is definitely flooded with entry level photographers and video people who see this path as a quick way to get out of their 9 to 5’s.
Once you get past the entry level phase there are not a lot of people who decided to stick it out. Learning a new skill is hard. The hardest part is after the excitement wears off, you have to look around at all of your peers and accept your inadequacy.
It happens to all of us. We see something, we love it, we decide to do it for ourselves. Then we start, the excitement wears off and we realize we are going to have to do a lot of fucking work to get to where we actually want to be.
Almost all of the people who told me all of the reasons why starting to try and freelance was a bad idea have reached out to me asking me for advice on how to start something of their own. If you get to this point, be humble, kind and gracious for God’s sake.
It is never going to seem like the right time. Your life is already full of all your other habits. If you want to start something new, just start it. You won’t be good at first but you are going to be one step closer to getting really good.
Just do not quit, be consistent and be honest about what you can do.
