Maybe it’s a business you can’t stop thinking about. A book you want to write. Art you want to make. A move you keep imagining. A course you’ve almost signed up for more than once. A trip you’ve researched right down to the neighbourhood you’d stay in. Maybe it’s something entirely different, and has still somehow managed to hang around for years, waiting for you to actually do it.
At some point, you may have done an impressive amount of work toward not actually doing the thing. I know I did. In fact, I bought the domain for Curvy as Fork four years ago.
I wrote some posts, then stopped writing them. I told myself all sorts of things about it. This is what I’ve always dreamed about doing, don’t stop! No one is going to read it. The world needs something like this. This is something I wish I’d had. How exactly am I going to make money from it? Do I even need to make money from it? Is this a business, or have I just invented myself a very expensive hobby? Depending on the day, I believed some combination of all of these things.
What I knew for sure was that I kept coming back to it. I could abandon it for months, sometimes longer, but it never quite went away. Every so often I’d pull it back out, fiddle with something, imagine what it could be, and then tuck it away again, because apparently four years is a perfectly reasonable amount of time to spend deciding whether you want to do something you very obviously want to do.
And I think that’s worth paying attention to. There are things we don’t do because we’ve changed our minds. We wanted them once and don’t anymore. That’s allowed. There is no prize for faithfully pursuing every idea you’ve ever had just because an earlier version of you thought it sounded good.
But then there are the things that keep coming back. There’s a real difference between saying I still haven’t done it and I keep coming back to it. One sounds like failure. The other sounds like data.
I think I spent a lot of those four years waiting for some kind of certainty about Curvy as Fork. I wanted to know it would work before I did the work, which, when you write it down like that, is obviously an excellent system and I’m surprised more business schools don’t teach it.
I wanted answers. What would it become? Would people read it? Could it make money? Would I still want to write it a year from now? Was there enough to say? Was I qualified to say it? Could I fit it into a life that was already very full?
Some of those are sensible questions. But sensible questions can also become incredibly convenient hiding places.
Eventually, I realised I didn’t need to know what Curvy as Fork would become. I needed to decide whether I wanted to make Curvy as Fork now. That’s a much smaller question, and annoyingly, I knew the answer.
I think this is where a lot of us get stuck, particularly when the thing we want feels connected to some future version of ourselves.
I’ll take the trip when I’m more comfortable in my body. I’ll take the class when work settles down. I’ll start dating when I’ve lost the weight. I’ll apply when I have another qualification. I’ll wear that when I’m more confident. I’ll start the business when I know more. I’ll make the thing when I’m better at making the thing.
The future woman is really quite impressive. She’s thinner, richer, braver, better rested, and apparently has absolutely nothing on her calendar. Meanwhile, the woman who actually exists keeps waiting for her to arrive.
Curvy as Fork is, in many ways, my argument against that. Not because I suddenly became fearless about doing it. I didn’t. Not because I answered every question. I haven’t. And definitely not because I woke up one morning with a flawless business plan and the serene confidence of a woman in a linen shirt staring thoughtfully at the ocean.
I just got tired of waiting.
This is where I think we sometimes make “do the thing” advice unnecessarily dramatic.
You don’t necessarily need to quit your job. Move countries. Spend $20,000. Announce your new identity to everyone you’ve ever met. Buy seventeen pieces of specialized equipment. Or turn the thing you love into a business before you’ve even discovered whether you enjoy doing it on a Tuesday.
Sometimes doing the thing means booking the class, buying the ticket, writing the first chapter, registering the domain and, ideally, not waiting four years to do something with it, sending the email, going by yourself, trying it badly. It means putting one real thing into the world instead of making another plan for eventually putting something into the world.
The first move doesn’t have to prove anything. It just has to move you from thinking about the thing to having some actual experience of the thing, because that’s when you finally get information your imagination can’t give you.
Maybe you’ll love it. Maybe you’ll discover the version you’ve been imagining isn’t actually the version you want. Maybe you’ll be terrible at it for a while. Maybe it will become important, or maybe it won’t. But at least you’ll be finding out.
The thought that sparked this article had been circling in my mind for a long time: you don’t have to be ready for the whole thing. You just have to be ready for the next real step.
Most of the things we put off for years were never one thing to begin with. We just talk about them like they are. Move. Write the book. Start the business. Said like that, of course nobody feels ready. We’ve taken something made up of a hundred small decisions and turned it into one enormous decision we’re supposed to somehow feel completely prepared to make.
If your thing is moving to another country, move is really a passport appointment, a ridiculous number of tabs open about neighbourhoods, a box labelled DONATE, and eventually a goodbye you haven’t figured out how to have yet. If your thing is writing a book, you cannot sit down this afternoon and casually knock out 80,000 words before dinner, but you can open a blank document and write one sentence you’re fully entitled to hate tomorrow. And if you’ve wanted to start a business, there are quite a few steps between I have an idea and a stranger giving you their credit card number. Most of them are considerably less terrifying than the fully formed business you’ve been carrying around in your head.
There is almost always a next real step. And I mean real deliberately. Not researching another 47 options because research has the very convenient quality of feeling like progress without requiring you to risk much. Not making the colour-coded spreadsheet about doing the thing. Not waiting until you feel confident, because confidence has an irritating habit of showing up after we’ve done something, not before. I mean something that changes the situation, even slightly. Something you can’t completely undo by closing your laptop.
Book the appointment. Submit the application. Tell someone. Make the reservation. Publish the page. Sign up. Ask the question. Put the first $20 in the account. Do something that means tomorrow you are no longer standing in exactly the same place you were standing today. You don’t need to know how the whole story ends. You just need to make the next part true.
I can’t promise that doing it will transform your life. That’s a lot of pressure to put on a pottery class. I also can’t promise you’ll be glad you did it. Occasionally we do the thing and discover we don’t actually like the thing. That’s useful too. You can stop wondering about it and go find another thing.
What I can tell you is that Curvy as Fork existed in my head for four years before I finally decided to find out what would happen if I stopped thinking about it and actually made it. And now you’re here reading it. That’s something I couldn’t have known four years ago. Maybe there’s something you can’t know yet either.
Go find out.
