You're Wasting Time You Don't Have.

We'd been in the car for hours. One of those long drives where the silence gets heavier the further you go, and the person next to you can feel it but doesn't want to push. Both afraid to speak. 

My then girlfriend knew that something was off. She'd known for a while, I think. I’d not been sleeping particularly well, and she’d found me on numerous occasions lost in my own thoughts. When we got home, she finally asked the two word question and the dam broke. I’d have loved to have rehearsed the explosive outpouring, but the internal pressure had built for so long, I had no control over the shape when it finally broke.

I told her I didn’t know what to do. Hadn’t known what to do for a long time. I wasn’t questioning  the relationship, it was the life. The acting. The industry. All of it. The version of myself that had been showing up to the same career for twenty years while something bubbled and festered and grew underneath it. A huge part of it was situational - the industry I had become part of back in the early 2000’s had changed almost beyond recognition, work was scarce, pay had gone down, and everything had become even more competitive. I hadn’t lost my passion for the work, but I didn’t have the stomach to continue. 

Ambition vs Quality Of Life, then. 

I had grown so tired of thinking about what else I might be able to do. Sick of the endless internal auditions - lying awake, driving in silence, sitting in dressing rooms turning the same questions over and over. What's the thing? What am I actually good at outside of this?

Is there even anything?  

Every quiet moment had been colonised by this search. First thought in the morning, last one at night - the most exhausting kind of inertia, where your mind is working constantly but your life stays perfectly still.

That was Summer of 2022. 

I didn't start my first business until January 2025.

Nearly three years. Gone.

I’m writing none of this for dramatic effect. I say it because when I look back now, from the other side of actually starting something, I can see the cost with a clarity that wasn't available to me while I was living inside it. The professional cost is obvious - the months I could have been building, testing, failing usefully, but the personal cost, the compounding erosion of my own credibility with myself, was hidden from plain sight. Every week I spent thinking instead of doing, I became slightly less convinced I was someone who could do anything at all.

I felt completely stuck. I could feel it. I could articulate it. I could explain to my girlfriend, through tears, exactly what was wrong. Knowing wasn't the problem. Knowing without acting was the problem, and that distinction was what was keeping me awake at night. The painful ongoing sting of lost time, the dull, heavy pressure I was loading onto myself, the repetition of the same thoughts, was beginning to paint me as someone who plans but doesn't act. Someone who has ideas but doesn't test them. Someone whose word to themselves carries absolutely no weight. 

There's a well-documented pattern in psychology called the sunk cost effect. It describes the tendency to stay committed to something, be that  a job, a relationship, or a direction, simply because you're already invested in it, even when all the evidence is telling you it's no longer working. The more you've given, the harder it becomes to walk away, because walking away feels like admitting the investment you made was wasted.

This is what kept me anchored to the job for years longer than I should have been. Twenty years of training, identity, public recognition and financial structure, was all tied to one role. This wasn't just a career. It was who I was. My history, my social circle, my sense of what I was capable of, all of it pointed in one direction. Stepping outside of that felt less like a career change and more like a complete identity collapse.

And so I waited. Waited for a confidence that was never going to arrive without evidence to support it. I waited for the right idea to present itself fully formed. I waited for some kind of signal that it was safe to move. And while I waited, the window slowly closed in front of me. 

Perhaps the cruellest part of this loop is how responsible you feel for getting trapped in it. You tell yourself you're being thoughtful. Strategic. You're not rushing into anything stupid. You're gathering information. But gathering information without acting on it isn't strategy, it’s a sophisticated way of hiding that looks productive from the outside but feels paralysing from within. I stayed in this loop for nearly three years, and I was very convincing - mostly to myself.

The longer you wait, the more attached you become to the quality of the first step. Three years of deliberation creates an unspoken expectation that when you finally move, the move has to justify the wait. It has to be the right idea, in the right form, at the right time. Otherwise what were those three years for? So the standard rises in direct proportion to the delay, and the delay extends in direct proportion to the standard, and you end up trapped inside a feedback loop that has all the structural integrity of a hamster wheel.

There’s inflation too.. Every month you don't start, starting requires more courage than it did the month before. The step doesn't actually get harder, but your perception of it does. Your mind adds complexity, risk and consequence. It inflates the gap between where you are and where you want to be until the distance feels unbridgeable.

When I did eventually move forward with some semblance of a plan (an idea), the first thing I tried wasn't even the right thing. Which, it turns out, is the whole point.

I'd started paying attention to what genuinely interested me, which at the time was AI. So I took an online course and began writing about what I was learning, not as a publishing strategy, but just as a way of processing the material. A bit like a journal. The AI business I was trying to build didn't work. The commercial side fell apart within months.

But something unexpectedly excellent happened within the process - the writing stuck.

I had remembered I could write. More than that, I remembered I loved it. The act of sitting down, organising thoughts, putting honest language around something I'd been carrying in my head. I hadn’t written in years, it didn't fit the identity I was so heavily invested in. But now, I was unstoppable. I wrote every day for a month, thoughts, ideas, stories, screenplays, and finally letters, just like the one you’re reading right now..

I started looking forward to it more than I looked forward to the acting, which in hindsight should’ve told me everything. Writing was mine. I hadn't inherited it. It hadn't been assigned to me at eighteen and maintained out of momentum for two decades. I'd found it by moving in a direction that turned out to be slightly wrong, and then paying attention to what the short journey revealed to me. 

Looking back now, the gap between waiting and doing turned out to be embarrassingly small. An online course, of all things. A few weeks of uncomfortable action. Some bad drafts nobody will ever read. That was it. Three years of agonising. One month of imperfect effort. If there's a less flattering ratio in human experience, I haven't found it.

If you're stuck in this loop right now - the loop where you know you want something different but can't seem to start, I need you to understand what's actually at play here.

You are not preparing. You are paying.

Every week you spend circling the thing you want to do, you lose some of the belief that you're a person who follows through. That belief is the foundation of everything else. Without it, even the right opportunity won't feel safe enough to take. You'll find a reason to wait. Because you always do. The reasons are endless, and they're always plausible, rational even, and they will keep you exactly where you are for as long as you let them.

The readiness you're waiting for is a feeling, and as I’ve written about previously, feelings fluctuate with sleep, stress, mood, and whether you ate lunch. If you've set "feeling ready" as the threshold for action, you've handed your future to something you cannot control. You might feel ready on a Tuesday morning and terrified by Wednesday afternoon. Nothing changed. Feelings just did what they always do.

Waiting doesn't protect you from failure, but it does ensure you fail slowly enough to pretend it isn't happening.

And it’s worth noting that the people around you won't flag it either. Nobody in your life is going to sit you down and say, "You've been talking about this for two years and you haven't done anything about it." They won't say it because most of them are doing the same thing. Waiting is normalised. Caution is respected. "Taking your time" is considered mature. The entire culture is set up to make standing still feel like a reasonable position. 

I promise you, it isn't. 

The research on this is unambiguous. Clarity follows action. Self-efficacy, the belief that you can do what you set out to do, is built by watching yourself follow through, not by thinking your way to confidence first. The person who picks a direction and moves, clumsily, before the path is clear, will learn more in a month than the person who spends six months trying to identify the perfect direction before taking a step. You discover what you're capable of by doing things. You discover what matters to you by trying things and noticing what you want to keep doing. You find out who you are outside of your current identity by generating evidence of something new, not by imagining it from the safety of your current one.

Protocol

1. When you notice yourself researching, planning, or "getting ready" instead of doing, stop. Write this sentence: "I have been thinking about [X] for [Y] months and I have not started." Read it back. That sentence is the visible cost. Then aim to do one thing, today, that moves you from thinking to contact with the actual work.

2. When you catch yourself attaching conditions to starting - "I'll begin when I have more time / more money / more clarity / more confidence" - cross out the condition. Start without it. The condition is the lock on the door. You put it there. You can remove it.

3. When the first attempt doesn't work, don't retreat to the planning phase. Adjust the direction and move again. The goal here is not to get it right. The goal is to generate information that only action can produce. Movement reveals. Stillness conceals. That's the rule.

Three years of waiting taught me exactly one thing; waiting teaches you nothing.

One month of imperfect action taught me everything I’m doing now.

Take Care 

- James