I waited three years to start writing.
Not because I didn’t want to. I wanted to desperately. I had ideas. I had things to say. I had a vague but persistent sense that writing was the thing I was supposed to be doing with my life. But every time I sat down to begin, something stopped me. Not fear, exactly. Something quieter and more insidious: the feeling that I wasn’t ready yet.
I needed to read more first. I needed to develop my ideas more fully. I needed to understand the landscape better. I needed to feel a certain way, a kind of internal green light, before I could start. And that green light never came. Not once, in three years of waiting for it.
What I didn’t understand then, and what behavioral science makes painfully clear, is that the feeling of readiness I was waiting for almost never arrives on its own. It’s not a prerequisite for action. It’s a byproduct of it.
The myth of the motivational sequence
Most of us carry around an assumption about how change works. It goes like this: first you feel motivated, then you take action. You get inspired, and the inspiration carries you forward into the new behavior. The feeling comes first. The doing comes second.
It sounds logical. It also happens to be backwards.
A paper published in Consulting Psychology Journal reviewing the neuroscience of goals and behavior change describes this problem directly. The authors note that psychologists have developed models of “stages of change” to capture variability in readiness, and taxonomies of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. But much of this work is descriptive rather than prescriptive. It tells you what motivation is, but it doesn’t tell you how to generate it. And the implicit assumption that motivation must precede action remains embedded in how most people think about change.
The neuroscience tells a different story. The brain’s reward circuitry, particularly the dopamine system, doesn’t just respond to desire or inspiration. It responds to effort, to progress, and to the anticipation of achievable goals. Dopamine functions primarily as a pursuit signal, released when you engage in goal-directed behavior, not when you sit around waiting to feel like engaging.
In plain language: your brain doesn’t give you the motivation to start. It gives you the motivation to continue, but only after you’ve already started.
Behavioral activation: the clinical proof
The clearest evidence for this comes from an unexpected source: the treatment of depression.
In the 1970s, clinical psychologist Peter Lewinsohn developed an approach called behavioral activation. The premise was radical for its time: instead of waiting for depressed patients to feel motivated, engaged, or hopeful before asking them to do things, clinicians would have them do things first and let the feelings follow.
It worked. And it didn’t just work a little. Subsequent research has shown that behavioral activation is as effective as full cognitive behavioral therapy for treating depression, and in some studies more effective. The mechanism is straightforward. When a person who is stuck begins taking small, concrete actions, the experience of those actions generates feedback. That feedback updates the brain’s reward predictions. Progress becomes visible. And the motivation that was supposedly missing all along starts to emerge, not as a precondition for action, but as a consequence of it.
This finding isn’t limited to clinical depression. It applies to anyone who has ever been stuck. The gym session you don’t feel like doing becomes motivating once you’re five minutes into it. The writing project that feels impossible becomes engaging once you’ve typed the first paragraph. The business idea that seems overwhelming becomes manageable once you’ve taken the first concrete step.
The feeling of readiness doesn’t precede the action. The action produces the feeling.
Why we wait anyway
If the science is this clear, why do so many people still wait? Why did I wait three years?
Because waiting feels productive. That’s the trap. When you’re researching, planning, preparing, and thinking about starting, you feel like you’re making progress. Your brain is engaged with the goal. You’re doing goal-adjacent activity, and that feels similar enough to actual goal pursuit that you can mistake one for the other.
But there’s a critical difference. Goal-adjacent activity, reading about writing, planning your business, researching fitness routines, doesn’t generate the same neurochemical feedback as actual goal pursuit. Your dopamine system doesn’t reward you for planning. It rewards you for doing. And the longer you stay in the planning phase, the more the gap between intention and action widens, and the harder the first step becomes.
As one review of the neuroscience of effort-driven motivation explains, the traditional view that desire precedes action is neurobiologically incomplete. Effort itself generates the neurochemical signals that sustain motivated behavior. Organizations that understand this principle design work environments where progress is visible and effort is recognized, because they know that waiting for intrinsic motivation to emerge on its own is a losing strategy.
The same applies to your personal life. If you’re waiting to feel ready before you start, you’re waiting for a signal that your brain isn’t designed to send under those conditions. The signal requires action first. Without action, you’re just waiting in the dark for a light that has no switch.
The readiness illusion
I think the deepest reason people wait is that starting feels like a commitment to being bad at something. And being bad at something, even temporarily, feels threatening to your identity.
When I was waiting to start writing, what I was really avoiding wasn’t the writing. It was the evidence that my writing might not be good. As long as I was “preparing,” I could maintain the identity of someone who was going to write something great. The moment I started, I’d become someone who had written something mediocre. And my ego preferred the fantasy of future greatness to the reality of present imperfection.
This is something I’ve thought about a lot through the lens of Buddhist practice. In Buddhism, there’s a concept called shenpa, which is often translated as “attachment” but is closer to “the hook.” It’s the moment when your mind latches onto a story about yourself and refuses to let go. The story of “I’ll start when I’m ready” is shenpa. It’s your ego hooking onto an identity that feels safe, and the attachment to that identity becomes stronger than the desire to actually change.
Meditation doesn’t remove shenpa. But it makes you better at noticing it. And noticing the hook is the first step toward not biting.
What actually happened when I stopped waiting
I started Hack Spirit not because I felt ready, but because I ran out of excuses. I was living in Australia, working a job that paid the bills but didn’t mean anything to me, and one evening I just opened a laptop and started typing. The writing was not good. The ideas were half-formed. The voice I was using wasn’t yet the voice you’re reading now. But I was doing it, and the doing changed everything.
Within weeks, the motivation problem I’d been wrestling with for years simply evaporated. Not because I’d found some new source of inspiration, but because the act of writing every day was generating its own momentum. Each piece was slightly better than the last. Each published article was proof that I could do it. And the brain, receiving that proof, kept sending the signal to continue.
The same thing happened when I moved to Saigon. I didn’t feel ready. I had a vague plan and a lot of uncertainty. But I went anyway, and the readiness materialized in the process of adaptation, not before it.
The same thing happened when I wrote Hidden Secrets of Buddhism. I didn’t feel qualified. I’m not a scholar. I’m a practitioner who reads a lot and thinks about what he reads. But I started writing, and the book emerged from the doing, not from some moment of cosmic permission that told me I was allowed.
What I’d tell someone who’s waiting
If you’ve been waiting to feel ready, to feel motivated, to feel confident enough to start, I want to say this as clearly as I can: that feeling is not coming. Not because there’s something wrong with you, but because that’s not how your brain works. The research is unambiguous on this point. Motivation follows action. It doesn’t lead it.
You don’t need to feel ready. You need to start before you feel ready and let the feeling catch up.
Start small. Start badly. Start with five minutes of the thing you’ve been putting off, and pay attention to how you feel after those five minutes, not before them. You’ll almost certainly feel more motivated after doing the thing than you did before doing it. And that tiny experience, repeated enough times, will rewire the story you’ve been telling yourself about needing to wait.
The most honest thing I can tell you about every meaningful thing I’ve built, my business with my brothers, my writing, my life in Saigon with my wife and daughter, is that none of it started with readiness. It started with action taken in the absence of readiness. And the readiness showed up later, disguised as momentum, proving that it was never the prerequisite I thought it was.
It was the result.
