It will never be a good time for anything

There’s a guy, I’ve written about him before, the 85-year-old guy who goes to the park to exercise six days a week. He’s been doing it for 30 years.

Maybe not at this particular park, because who knows where else he’s lived during that time, but exercising, somewhere, 6 days a week, for 30 years.

It doesn’t matter what the weather is like. Even in late January or early February, when it’s dark, and the weather is freezing, and there is ice on the ground, he is there.

When I wake up early in the morning and think, “God, this bed is so warm, I just want to stay here,” the only reason I put my feet on the floor and stand up and get moving is because I’m thinking, “If the 85-year-old guy can do it, I can do it too.”

At an age when most others are either dead or barely able to move, the 85-year-old man is walking laps in the icy pre-dawn hours.

The only reason he is able to do this at 85 is that when he was 75 he was also doing it, and when he was 65 he was also doing it, and when he was 55 he was also doing it. He didn’t wait until he was 84 and say, “Oh, you know what, I should get in shape.”

Think of what he has probably seen over those 30 years. He has probably seen his wife die. He has probably seen grandchildren born, and he has probably seen some of them die. He has probably seen disasters come, and he has probably seen disasters go. Many times, probably more than I can count, he has gone through things that would cause perfectly reasonable people to say, “Okay, you can stop now.”

But still, he went to the park, working on the skill he would need when he was 85. The skill that now others only wish they had.

What that 85-year-old man knows is that the time is never right to start, or continue, anything. Whatever it is that you want to do, start doing it, right now. The time will never be right, and it will never be good.

Related Posts

On AI and consulting

I have a number of clients in the consulting business, and many members of this email list are consultants. This one goes out to them… Some outside the industry say consulting is all about the collection and presentation of data. However, the real business of...

There is no spoon

This subject line is, of course, a reference to the scene in the movie The Matrix where Neo visits the Oracle's house and the weird bald kid tells him how to bend the spoon. (As you can tell, I am a huge fan of The Matrix, and in fact have, for over three years, been...

More on AI and writing

ChatGPT (and similar LLMs) will get you 90% of the way there. Which means if you are using ChatGPT to write your sales materials, you will convert about 10% of the time, which in B2B leads to bankruptcy. If you are a going concern, you will usually convert 20% to 25%...