“I learned a long time ago that there is something worse than missing the goal and that’s not pulling the trigger,” Mia Hamm.  Wasting time waiting for the right moment rather than spending time learning to perfect our aim.  I know there are some people out there who don’t understand that feeling—when you really want something but it never feels quite right to go for it.  The bold ones who never let anything hold them back.  But there are those who struggle with even knowing who they are let alone what they want, and even if they do know what they want, there are things inside of them they let hold them back. But if we don’t go for it then there is no chance of it ever happening.  So we learn to go again.  We learn to take what happened the first time and shift it for what happens the next time.  When we don’t even try there is the loss of the opportunity.  When we build momentum and take that initial shot, we create space to try again, to learn more and come back and make it right.  Not pulling the trigger keeps us exactly where we are.

I was one of those “try” people for a long time.  Now, don’t get me wrong, there is value in trying—it’s why we sample things, why we dip our toes.  But trying really doesn’t get us anywhere.  It keeps us on the edge checking the conditions rather than jumping in and learning to swim.  I’ve tried a million things—I was a professional try-er. And it was fun!  There was always the thrill of something new, the moment where I felt like “this is it!” followed by the inevitable crash.  I was really good at starting things.  I was even pretty good at planning things.  Not so good at executing them.  I became even better at finding a way to not commit because the next thing sounded better.  Trying has its purpose in that it really can show us different experiences that may work for us.  But if we are stuck in trying and not doing then we end up not learning anything of any depth—we never move beyond the practice field.  Or, better yet in the case of ADD, we are constantly changing the target so we never learn how to hit the goal.  In some cases, even with rapidly changing the target, at least we are building skill, but if we never go for it, then we never learn.

I know a lot about regret for a variety of reasons.  Spending too much time on the wrong things, not spending enough time on the right things, not taking time to find my “thing.”  The biggest regret we all have is wasted time and not using our time to our advantage.  I hate the saying that we all have the same hours because that isn’t true.  First of all, we don’t even all have the same time—we never know when our time is up, so automatically all we can do is our best.  But as far as our day to day, we don’t have the same hours because our hours are all allocated differently and for different reasons—we can’t compare one person to another because there is always something that we don’t know about.  And I’m learning as I get older just how arbitrary time is.  It’s a man-made construct in order to keep us on some semblance of social graces—but the time of nature is what we are all made of.  So when the feeling strikes us, that is when we need to act and pull the trigger.  We are the only ones who know when that time is.  Don’t let it pass us by.  It can be a scary thing to pull the trigger but it’s even scarier to think about what happens if we don’t—if we miss we can try again, if we don’t go for it, time moves on.