Start Where You Are Not Where You Wish You Were
How to start where you are
I received a message last month from someone who had been following my work for a couple of years. He told me he had been meaning to write seriously for about four years, and that every year he had identified a reason the current moment was not quite right. One year it was the apartment, too small and too noisy. The year after that, it was the job, too demanding to leave room for creative work. Last year, it was a relationship that needed his full attention. He said that this year everything finally aligned. The apartment was right; the job had eased; the relationship had settled. And he still was not writing. He wanted to know what was wrong with him.
Nothing was wrong with him. The conditions had changed, but the pattern had not, because the pattern was never really about the conditions. It was about the belief, rarely examined, that the right place to be was somewhere other than exactly here. The apartment, the job, the relationship had each taken their turn as the reason, but the reason was not the point. It was a story about arrival and a future moment when everything would align, and a beginning would finally feel appropriate. That moment, as he was understanding, was not coming. Not because life would never cooperate, but because the feeling of readiness he was waiting for does not precede beginning. It follows it.
This is the idea I returned to most often while writing From Dreamer to Achiever The book is about the space between knowing what you want to build and actually building it, and the thing I kept finding in that space was the belief that starting required something more than what was currently available. More time, more certainty, more of whatever felt most absent in the current moment. The book pushes back on that belief directly, not by arguing that conditions do not matter, but by pointing out that waiting for better conditions is itself a choice, and it is almost never the most useful one.
Starting where you are is not a motivational idea. It is practical. It means using what is actually available: the time you have, the resources you have, the clarity you have, rather than the time, resources, and clarity you believe you would need to do this properly. Properly is a moving target that stays just out of reach, which is convenient if some part of you finds not starting more comfortable than the uncertainty of what starting might reveal. Most people who wait for the right conditions are not lazy. They are afraid, and the conditions give the fear somewhere to live that sounds reasonable.
The man who wrote to me was not wrong in that his conditions had improved. They probably had. Four years of practice, regardless of the apartment, would have led him to greater achievement by now. The conditions do not give you the work. The work gives you the work. And the only way to have it is to start, imperfectly, in whatever circumstances are currently present, and to let those circumstances shape the work rather than waiting for better ones to make it easier.
The book From Dreamer to Achiever starts from this premise and builds outward from it. The dreamer is not someone without ability or ambition. The dreamer is someone who has located their beginning at a point in the future that keeps moving. The achiever is not someone who had better circumstances. The achiever is someone who decided that the current circumstances, however imperfect, were the ones they were going to work with. That decision, made once and then renewed each time the old story tries to reassert itself, is the whole difference.
I wrote back to the man who had messaged me. I informed him he had not wasted the four years, as everything he learned, observed, and thought about during that time would be present in the writing when it emerged. But I also told him that there was no version of this story in which continuing to wait produced a different result than continuing to wait. The conditions were as good as they were going to get that day. They might be better next year, and they might not be. The writing would tell him more about what he needed than any amount of preparation could. The only way to find out was to start.
He wrote back two weeks later. He had written every morning for fourteen days. The apartment was the same. The job had gotten slightly more demanding again. He said none of that had mattered in the way he had expected it to. What mattered was that he had started, and starting had changed the story he was telling himself about what was possible.
Whatever you have been waiting to begin, the conditions you are in right now are the ones available to you. They are imperfect in specific ways and probably better than you are giving them credit for in others. Start with what you have, where you are, today. Not because the timing is ideal, but because you build the timing you are waiting for through doing, rather than it being delivered before you start.
Wishing you a steady and intentional week ahead.
See you next week,
Pierre P.