I Started Anyway...
On the myth of readiness
I had just turned 18 when I stumbled across a quote.
“I have led a toothless life. A toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on — and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone.”—Jean-Paul Sartre
It just sat there, uncomfortable, slightly close to something beyond the scope of my understanding — something I could not label nor identify.
I turned 20 a couple of weeks ago. And it found its way back to me. This time, I understood it — not as a clichéd motivational quote, not as life advice, but as a warning.
There’s a story we tell ourselves about timing — a quiet, subconscious, universally respected story that everyone believes without ever choosing to. The right moment. A threshold. A trigger, invisible but real, that separates the foolish from the wise, the failures from the successful, the prepared from the presumptuous. One day that time will arrive. You’ll know it when you feel it.
You’ll feel ready.
Most people keep waiting. And one day they too will notice their teeth are gone.
I am twenty years old. I am in college. And I have started anyway.
Not because I resolved the doubt, or because the path became clear, or because I arrived at some threshold that finally felt right. I started because I realized that dreams do not wait and that postponing one thing has a way of becoming a habit, a posture, a life.
I cannot point to a clean moment of decision. There was no morning I woke up transformed, no book that gave me permission, no epiphany that dissolved the uncertainty. What shifted was quiet and strange. I stopped being held back by the fear of failure and started being pulled forward by something I can only describe as the joy of invisible progress. A sense of existing beyond purpose. An unclear motive I have no better word for than life, a purpose in existence.
I am writing and publicly sharing this, confused and lost, mid-process and mid-becoming.
After one thing comes another. That much I know. And I did not want to spend my twenties postponing the first — not knowing when will my time arrive.
We are never ready. And if the brain is left to operate within its own architecture, we will keep waiting for something our biology will never trigger.
When faced with fear, ambiguity, and uncertainty, the brain fires inhibitory neurons directly into the prefrontal cortex — effectively halting action until conditions feel more reliable. The brain is not being cowardly. It is doing exactly what it was built to do: protect us from the unknown.
Most confuse readiness with discipline. Readiness is fear wearing a respectable coat. The bar moves in proportion to our awareness — the more seriously we take our work, the more we understand its depth, the further mastery seems. Competence, paradoxically, makes the unprepared feel more unready, not less. People tend to treat ambiguous situations as roughly twice as bad as risky ones, meaning the mere absence of a clear path feels worse than one with known dangers. We are not waiting for the right moment. We are waiting for a certainty that will never arrive.
Spinoza understood this before neuroscience had the vocabulary for it. He worked in near-total isolation, excluded from the institutions that might have validated him, publishing anonymously because the ideas mattered more than the permission. He did not wait for grants or standing. He thought, he wrote, and he started. The world owed him nothing. He built anyway.
In today’s age, the greatest driver of that fear is exposure — being seen before we are good. The gap between ambition and current ability, made visible to the world. But fear never accounts for the trade-off: between avoiding what is potentially dangerous and exploring it because there might be a payoff. The fear of starting has a cost. A cost that compounds quietly and invisibly — until one day you look up and notice that your teeth are gone.
There is an unquestionable systematic belief people lead their lives with, that life moves in sequences. First you learn then you do. First you prepare then you begin. First you become then you build. Its a comfortable model, thats also false.
Life is not a series of phases. It is a continuous experience — one unbroken motion forward, whether you are conscious of it or not. The years do not pause while you prepare. The world does not hold its breath while you gather the conditions for a cleaner start. Time moves in one direction, indifferent to whether you have decided to move with it.
Most people never pick up on this. They live what I can only call an unconscious life, not unintelligent, not unambitious, but operating on the assumption that there is a later, a better moment, a more suitable version of themselves waiting just ahead. And so they defer. Reasonably. Patiently. Indefinitely.
People wait to start their journey, not knowing they are already in the middle of it, you either move with intention or get carried away. Readiness was never a prerequisite, it was never a gate you pass through. The day you were born is your start, dont delay it any further.
The clarity you are waiting for does not exist somewhere ahead of you, fully formed, ready to be collected. It is built in motion, through the act of doing without full comprehension, through the discomfort of visible imperfection, through the slow accumulation of lessons only the doing can teach.
Life, at its core, is a field trip. An open exploration with no fixed syllabus, no guaranteed outcome, no teacher who will tell you when you are ready to move to the next room. You move. You discover. You adjust. And somewhere in that motion — not before it, not after it — you become.
To start is to live.
Since I started, I have not become fearless. I have become comfortable with fear.
I no longer avoid the uncomfortable question, the uncertain path, the visible imperfection. I have learned to act on my whys, not on the conditions, not on the approval, not on the feeling of readiness that never came. The whys were always there. What changed was my willingness to move before everything else aligned.
I have stopped being afraid of the unknown. Not because the unknown became less vast, it didn't. But because Exploring it is the only honest response to being alive. To refuse the exploration is to refuse the experience of being. And I would rather be hurt by the truth of where I am than be comforted by the illusion of where I might one day begin.
Potential is inert. It does not develop in silence or ripen in patience. It moves only when acted upon, and what acts upon it is not time, not preparation, not the right conditions. It is the decision to begin.
You only get one shot at life.
Not a practice run. Not a rough draft to be revised when conditions improve. One life with a fixed and unknown expiration, indifferent to whether you were ready, whether you were prepared, whether you felt the timing was right.
And yet most of us spend a remarkable portion of it waiting. Waiting to be qualified enough, confident enough, certain enough. Waiting for the fear to pass, for the embarrassment to feel less sharp, for the version of ourselves that finally has it together to show up and take over.
Spoiler alert, that version is not coming.
What is here right now, uncertain and unfinished, is all there is. And I have come to believe that it is shameful to be handed one life and spend it on the sidelines, managing your exposure, protecting yourself from the discomfort of being seen mid-process. Not shameful as a judgment. Shameful as a waste.
Go out and make a fool of yourself. Explore the thing you have been circling for months. Start the project that feels too big, the conversation that feels too vulnerable, the life that feels too ambitious for someone who isn’t ready yet.
One day you will look back on your life. The only question worth sitting with today is simple: when that moment comes, will you have bitten into it?