How do you know when you’re ready?

I’ll let you know, but first, let me tell you about these three little pigs …

Something I didn’t predict has happened: the more regularly I talk about finishing, the more conversations I have with people about starting. In the last month, I’ve been approached (separately) by three people who each want to begin a new project. They have an idea they’ve been steeping or otherwise quietly working on and they’re debating if they should make it “real” by committing to it publicly. The subtext of two of these conversations was: how do I know when I’m ready?

There’s no universal answer to this question. Readiness depends upon any number of individual and contextual factors. Still, I’m going to throw this out there: if you keep wondering if you’re ready to start something, you’re ready to start. If you’ve been watching others who started something and you feel excited (and a little bit jealous) as you watch, that too means you’re ready (enough) to begin.

Why “ready enough”? Because you don’t have to feel completely ready — and what’s more, you don’t need to be ready technically either. You really only need to feel restless and impatient to find out what would happen if you did begin. Impatience is readiness in disguise.

Here’s a close-to-home example of what it looks like to be “ready enough to begin.”

My daughter, who doesn’t yet know how to read, has started reading books to us. She’s not reading in the technical sense, but she’s reading in every other sense. She selects a book, has us sit close, and won’t begin until we’re paying attention. She tells the story, from memory, from beginning to end, moving from page to page, her eyes darting around the illustrations for cues to plot points or dialogue. That she can’t read the words doesn’t slow or discourage her. “What’s that say?” she’ll sometimes ask, interrupting herself to point at a line. And then I feed her the line, sotto voce, because she is, after all the lead actor here. She repeats it, not skipping a beat, and the story flows on.

You really only need to feel restless and impatient to find out what would happen if you did begin. Impatience is readiness in disguise.

But there’s more: in many ways, she reads books better than a long-time reader might. She never plows over words in a monotone steamroll the way some passionless readers do. Even on her 48th reading of the Three Little Pigs, it’s as if she’s telling the story for the first time, as if she’d prefaced it with “You won’t believe what happened to these three pigs …” As the story unfolds, she modulates her voice to emphasize the most shocking moments (“the wolf ATE the little pig.”) Then she pauses for dramatic effect and holds my gaze in a long and soul-piercing look. If I didn’t know her, and if I didn’t know I was too old for school, I’d be worried she was about to call on me.

My daughter never asked anyone if she was ready to begin reading books. After hours and hours of being read to, she just sat down with books and started doing it. She’s not technically reading, but she sure gets the storytelling job done. She was ready to read, not when she could read the words, but when she decided she was ready.

It can be the same for you now as it was for the smaller you, who didn’t wait until you could walk to begin trying to walk.

“Here’s the bad news,” writes Elise Blaha Cripe, “you are unprepared to do something before you’ve done it. Here’s the good news: that doesn’t matter.”

So, if you’re wondering if you’re ready to start your next thing. Or the next big part of your current thing. I’m here to tell you: you are ready. You are ready enough. Begin.

And when you’re done, come back and let me know what you find on the flip side. Because the next question I’d love to get some answers to: how do we know when we’re finished?