I was listening to motivational videos one day recently and I heard something that has really stuck with me since then. I don’t remember the exact wording; however, this is essentially what it was saying:

“We all say we are going to start “later”. Later, when we have more time. Later, when I don’t have this obligation going on. Later, when I get my life together. We tell ourselves that we always have later to start; however, we assume “later” that we won’t also be busy and that we will live long enough to make it to “later.”

These words really felt like they were speaking to me. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come up with ideas that I want to do or goals I want for my life and I tell myself “I’ll do that next week.”

I’m sure most of us can relate when we say this on repeat for several weeks in a row and then suddenly it’s the end of the year, you are a year older, and you have a new gray hair that appeared out of nowhere. We tell ourselves “later” when actually what we are telling ourselves we are never doing something. We tell ourselves later because we have the good intentions to actually do it later; however, later never ends up coming around.

I’ve found myself in this trap a tremendous amount. I have goals that I really want to work toward and things I want to accomplish in my life, but I know that achieving these things will take an extraordinary amount of work. When I think about doing these things on top of everything else on my plate it feels incredibly overwhelming and I put those goals on the back burner. I then tell myself I’ll just focus on those “later” when I don’t have as much going on.

The fact of the matter is that is a valid point. I do have many things on my plate right now. That’s what makes it so easy for me to just tell myself “I can do x,y,z later.” I tell myself tomorrow, next week, next month, or sometime in the future. Then I get to the end of a year and feel unaccomplished because I didn’t focus on the goals I had for myself.

The truth is I may never have what I consider to be “enough time.” When I came to that conclusion recently something in my brain just clicked. If I still won’t have “enough time” in the future will that mean that I will never accomplish the goals I have for my life? Taking a brutal look at my life if I live with the same mentality to wait for when I have more time it’s likely that I will never have that time. I then had to take a hard look at myself and tell myself that if I do want these things, I need to stop making that excuse of doing something “later” and make the time to do it now.

That means I will have to make sacrifices. That I will have to use the little time I have to work on my goals. It will not be easy, but I refuse to live in the excuse that I will do something “later” anymore. I’m tired of going every single year disappointed I didn’t work on what I wanted. I refuse to let myself let my life go by anymore without putting in the action. Instead of saying “later” I’m going to say “now”.