Waiting For "Ready" – Why Are We Still Doing That?
No Vacation Required
Is Waiting for the "Perfect Time" Sabotaging Your Future?
We often treat our dreams like fragile artifacts that can only be handled once we are "fully prepared" – whether that means reaching a certain age, hitting a savings goal, or waiting for the world to feel less turbulent. In this episode, we challenge the tradition of deferring life and explain why working with what you have is the most effective way to create lasting change.
Drawing from our own history of starting a "no vacation required,” we break down the trap of the "I’m waiting because" list. From the importance of intentional doing to the surprising way dreams expand once you actually start moving, this episode is a call to fast-track your goals rather than keeping them in a permanent state of "later."
Onward and Inward,
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CHAPTERS:
(00:00) Why are we still doing that?
(00:51) Mind Share: The "Locked In" mentality and the satisfaction of flow
(03:30) Lessons from the "Dream of the Planet"
(05:32) Looking back at the "Old Days" of starting NVR
(07:10) Fragility and the myth of the "guaranteed" future
(09:55) Why starting now makes your dreams bigger
(11:41) March 2020: A case study in living for now
(13:33) Intentional Doing vs. "Churning"
(15:19) Understanding who you are as a tool for change
(16:45) Worth the Time: Why games are essential for mental clarity
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
Work With What You Have: Waiting for the "right time" is a cycle that often leads to permanent deferment; the most powerful place to start is exactly where you are.
Intentional Doing: Effective change is not about just "doing something" to feel busy; it must be tied to a clear vision of your life and your unique personality.
Fragility as Motivation: Because health, politics, and social structures are inherently fragile, fast-tracking your dreams is a practical strategy rather than a risky one.
RESOURCES MENTIONED:
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
00:00:00 Kent
We say we want change, but we keep ignoring the tools already in our hands. Instead of building on what we have, we look elsewhere and then wonder why things don't move. It's not because we're incapable, but it's because we're taught to wait until we're more ready or fully prepared. Today's conversation is about foundations and why working with what we have is often the most powerful place to start.
00:00:26 Kent
Welcome to the No Vacation Required podcast, where we break down tired traditions and outdated thinking by asking the question, why are we still doing that? It's all about building a life you don't need a break from, being more present and fulfilled, and showing up in a complicated world that needs your voice and unique talents.
00:00:48 Caanan
Kent, what is on your mind? For mind share.
00:00:52 Kent
What's on my mind is the phrase locked in. You can tell I was excited to share a mind show this week because we use the phrase locked in all the time.
00:01:02 Caanan
We've used it forever.
00:01:03 Kent
Yeah. And then I'm just learning that there's an official meaning of locked in, which is why wait until the new year or whatever, like lock blank behavior in now.
00:01:16 Kent
So more than anything, I'm fully supportive of the idea, the concept. I was thinking like, we're so far ahead of the times because haha, we were talking about this, but we talk about it all the time on the podcast and we were talking about it in recent episodes. Change isn't for just the first of the year or after the wedding or right after Labor Day or when the kids go to school. Let's lock it in now. And now means whenever you're having the thought that something needs to change.
00:01:45 Caanan
Yeah. That's funny. That is what we talked about like 2 episodes ago, I think, or maybe it was the last one. And we're seeing that phrase everywhere. You know, what's interesting is my mind share this week is actually kind of tied to locking in. And it's that I love a period, you know, after a period where the schedule's really disrupted and dysregulated and you have all these different things going on. When you can get into a rhythm with your schedule and things are regulated and predictable and you have the opportunity to really lock in and get into flow, it's so satisfying.
00:02:25 Kent
I feel it. So let's lock in.
00:02:27 Caanan
Let's lock in.
00:02:35 Kent
We're at a time where, I guess we're always in this time. So many of our clients are working directly with change, of course. But at a time when we've been talking with friends and family about these things and with all the turbulence in the world, just want to put off change. So we've actually been talking with a lot of people about motivational interviewing, which is kind of the different stages of preparedness or not.
00:03:04 Kent
for change. And it always makes us think back to when we started this no vacation required life. I think so much about how we had realized at some point we wanted to have dreams for later in life. That's what everybody does. The dream of the planet.
00:03:21 Caanan
Yes. We were doing a lot of dreamscaping.
00:03:24 Kent
Yeah.
00:03:24 Caanan
Early on.
00:03:25 Kent
We retired. We're gonna, we, we talked about all sorts of things like that.
00:03:30 Kent
own a nursery with flowers and plants, et cetera. And then there came that point. And I mean, I remember what was going on around that time. We talk about that a lot. We wrote about it in our book, No Vacation Required, but we just decided, no, we need to do it now. And it seemed impossible because as our clients, friends, and loved ones are talking about now, it seems like, oh, we're just so unprepared.
00:03:56 Caanan
Yes. Yeah. We had that strong sense, like,
00:04:00 Caanan
yeah. As you just said, Kent, this is what everybody kind of goes through. I want to achieve something. I want to do something new and exciting. I want to achieve my dream, but I've got to do all of these other things before I can get there. I have to have a certain amount of retirement. I have to, the kids have to be out of the house. Whatever the
00:04:23 Caanan
you said dream of the planet kind of preparation is, and then you end up deferring all of your dreams for later. And we had that recognition very early that we could actually start checking some of these things off our list, right where we were.
00:04:40 Kent
Yeah, I was just, well, we were actually talking about this the other week. We heard that psychologist talking about regarding another topic.
00:04:49 Kent
how study after study shows that people are completely saturated again with the turbulence of the world. And that's where you and I, in our practice, in our real life, hear an increase of that language. Everything feels so fragile now.
00:05:08 Caanan
Right.
00:05:08 Kent
That the I'm waiting because list is getting even longer. So you and I are arguing why
00:05:18 Kent
Are we not working with what we have?
00:05:28 Caanan
I'm so glad way back when we decided to...
00:05:32 Kent
Way back when, like where?
00:05:34 Caanan
Way back when.
00:05:34 Kent
We were born in the 1800s.
00:05:36 Caanan
Back in ye old days, when we started our, what we now call our no vacation required life, that we...
00:05:45 Caanan
did decide to just start making the changes that we could and start pursuing our quote unquote later in life dreams and working with what we had at the time.
00:05:55 Kent
Yes.
00:05:56 Caanan
Because there are two things that I want to say about that. One, we knew we wanted to get out and travel the world.
00:06:04 Kent
Yeah.
00:06:04 Caanan
Like so many people do. That's a common dream that people defer. We wanted to make a difference.
00:06:12 Caanan
give back. And we wanted to do work that was more fulfilling than what we were doing at the time, the corporate roles we were in. But two things that are interesting is traveling and giving back in the way that we could at the time really opened our eyes to the reality of the world and let us know that we were living in a bubble.
00:06:32 Kent
Which we kind of knew, but we felt sort of naive, didn't we? I think what you're referring to is right at our kickoff, we went and volunteered for many, many months in South America.
00:06:42 Caanan
Yes.
00:06:44 Kent
And were exposed to the realities of the common world.
00:06:49 Caanan
Yes, we had an intellectual idea of what the world was like. But until you
00:06:56 Caanan
are in it. You don't know it. So we got out there and we started to see the world as it actually is and not how we had sort of understood it. And that was a big difference.
00:07:10 Kent
Because we realized there was a fragility to the world. And we started thinking, correct me here if I'm just misremembering our evolvement at that time, but we started thinking like,
00:07:23 Kent
Oh, I'm glad we did this now with us, but now I'm also glad we did this because I think the world is a little bit shakier. You know, we had always thought like, oh, the world will always be waiting, listening to all those silly platitudes. Like, the world will always be just like it is now. And we realized early on, gosh, the world is not going to be like it is now.
00:07:46 Caanan
Yes, our internal barometers, because we were traveling and seeing more of the world,
00:07:51 Caanan
shifted and we started to think, this idea that life is short and that you might not always have the chance to do whatever it is you want to do is feeling more real than it ever has. And we started to become very attuned to the idea that there is no guarantee
00:08:13 Caanan
that our later in life dreams can come true, that we can ever achieve those later in life. So we better fast track that stuff.
00:08:20 Kent
Yeah.
00:08:21 Caanan
And that was a huge pivotal moment for us.
00:08:24 Kent
We felt doubly emboldened. And funny little side note, just based on what you were saying, because I hadn't thought about this for a long time. Remember teaching English in some shanty towns in
00:08:36 Kent
Ecuador. And I remember, you know, we had caught all sorts of different things over time because where we taught English, there was also the dental clinic and the medical clinic. So although we were fully armed, we, we were getting sick constantly. Yeah. And I remember being there almost daily teaching English, helping the doctors and constantly racing off to the bathroom. It was, it was the,
00:09:04 Kent
It was the cadence of that time. So yeah, we're getting back on the bus to head back to our apartment each night and thinking, wow, I'm kind of scared that we did this living now thing, but I'm also very glad that we did this living now thing.
00:09:25 Caanan
Yes, because recognizing our health is fragile, life is fragile, the social, political,
00:09:32 Caanan
world is fragile. None of this is guaranteed to work for us later, so we better do it now. But the other thing I wanted to talk about, point two, is that, and this was really surprising, as we started to get out there and started to move closer to the life we wanted to have, we started to realize that our dreams were way too small.
00:09:54 Kent
Yeah.
00:09:55 Caanan
because we had crafted them within the context of our kind of small life at the time. And what we knew. Yes.
00:10:03 Kent
What we knew.
00:10:04 Caanan
And until we started to move toward who we wanted to be and the life we wanted to live, did we have the perspective that we could dream way bigger than we ever thought we could? So not only were we...
00:10:20 Caanan
starting to move toward the life we wanted to have because we were working with what we had. We were doing what we could at the time. It blew our brains wide open.
00:10:29 Kent
Yeah.
00:10:30 Caanan
And our dreams got much bigger.
00:10:32 Kent
Yeah. And I want to say before we get into some, some solutions here that now I'm fast forwarding to the end of that first version of our notification required life. And we had known for a few years.
00:10:45 Kent
that there was gonna be a life, there's gonna be a version of no vacation required living beyond the one we were living. Yeah, like you're saying, we just over those years uncovered so many things that we got neck deep in this beautiful growth phase. We call that our, our growth phase. But when we were ready to be done, we were done. So in 2019, we were so excited that our, our word for the year in
00:11:12 Kent
2020 was going to be done. And we were starting it in March 2020. So we've talked about this before. There's that there's that picture of me in Hawaii and I'm holding a bottle of champagne and a piece of paper with the word done on it. And what literally like the next day, the next week, everything happened with COVID. And then we had a billion conversations about how we always knew how smart it was to live for now.
00:11:41 Caanan
Yes.
00:11:42 Kent
Yeah. Yeah.
00:11:44 Caanan
But, and to that point, a global pandemic, social unrest, the political environment we're in now, all of these things are making it clearer and clearer that our decision to start taking off our goals, to start where we were, to work with what we had was really smart. And that advice does not change even though the world has gotten
00:12:11 Caanan
a little scarier and those dreams are maybe a little harder to attain now, it's still a good time to work with what you have.
00:12:27 Kent
So we say we know, work with what you have. There's always a way to work with what you have when you want to change because yeah, who knows what's next?
00:12:39 Kent
Maybe you do need a blank to most effectively blank, but it doesn't mean that you can't start now or that time will slip away. As we see with clients all the time, and we've seen so much recently with our loved ones. Yeah. How's this for something you've heard a million times, and now I'm going to make it a million and one. The time will never be right.
00:13:02 Caanan
The time will never be.
00:13:04 Kent
Yeah, but what we're saying is have a work with what?
00:13:08 Kent
I have mentality, which I'm trying to think of like, how do I say this without sounding like a whole new podcast episode? It's a abundance mindset, which really is a whole different episode, but you've gotta be thinking, I'm gonna work with what I have, not, I'm not ready. And this is why. So get in that mindset to work with what you have.
00:13:33 Caanan
And can I jump in here and say that with the
00:13:37 Caanan
political and social unrest and the world feeling very scary, a lot of people feel like they just need to be doing something.
00:13:47 Kent
Yeah.
00:13:47 Caanan
Right. So we start to make changes that actually aren't intended to move us toward any sort of vision for our life. They're just, they're like churning as a hoarder where you're just sort of moving things around to feel like you're processing, but you're not really,
00:14:06 Caanan
It's not an effective approach to change or to achieving a vision for your life.
00:14:11 Kent
It's like flipping between Instagram and TikTok and feeling like you're doing something. It kind of is. It's sort of like you're just sort of shuffling things around so you can have some sort of feeling like, I'm doing something, aren't I?
00:14:25 Caanan
Yes.
00:14:25 Kent
Yeah, yeah.
00:14:27 Caanan
So it's important to say, like,
00:14:31 Caanan
I want to talk about intentional doing. Before I say that, I want to say that we also do recommend making little changes in your life all the time so that you can practice changing. So we're not talking about meatless Monday or deciding you're going to try a new coffee shop or something. Those are great little changes that are important to make
00:14:54 Caanan
through your life. But when we talk about working with what you have and changing to start to fast track to the life you want to have.
00:15:05 Kent
Yeah.
00:15:06 Caanan
This is where we use the term intentional doing.
00:15:09 Kent
Intentional doing.
00:15:10 Caanan
And this is change that is related to a vision you have for your life and your understanding of who you are as a person.
00:15:18 Kent
Yeah.
00:15:19 Caanan
And so we can't, we can't talk about fast tracking your dream life. We can't talk about bringing the future forward. We can't talk about working with what you have now without talking about vision and most importantly,
00:15:36 Caanan
understanding who you are.
00:15:37 Kent
Yeah, I mean, that's always so important. It's just at the center of everything we do. If you know who you are, then you know how to best look at this puzzle that is your life and the puzzle that is the immediate change in front of you. It allows you to access, well, why am I looking at this? Like I need to get all of these other things in place before I can change. Knowing how you operate, knowing how you're made up,
00:16:04 Kent
allows you to understand, oh, this is why I have this mindset, and this is how I can tweak my perspective so that I can take that first meaningful step, that intentional doing that you're talking about, Canaan, to feel like I'm successfully working with what I have.
00:16:28 Caanan
Okay, Kent, do you mind if I lead worth the time this week? Because I've got something.
00:16:34 Kent
I can tell you're, you can tell this is one of those times where you're like, I've got one, I've got one, I've got one. Yeah. So I, this stage is completely yours. I think I'm going to be kind of blown away.
00:16:45 Caanan
Well, yeah, don't oversell it. Something that I've been thinking about a lot and actually makes a lot of sense for what we're talking about today is
00:16:54 Caanan
When I'm trying to come up with a good idea or figure something out, it is never helpful for me to just sit and say, think about the thing, come up with the idea. It is a total block. My best ideas never come to me when I'm trying to come up with an idea, but they do come up when we're playing games.
00:17:20 Caanan
like when I'm doing the crossword or we're doing a spelling bee or something. And so I wanted to throw out there, my worth the time this week. It's so basic, but it's so helpful. Games.
00:17:33 Caanan
Having these sort of brain stimulating distractions, I think are so good, I think they're good for your mental health. Well, I know they're good for your mental health, but it's such a good way to sort of in the background process things that you're trying to figure out. And oftentimes I'll be shocked.
00:17:53 Caanan
and how an idea will come to me as I'm working on the crossword or we're doing a Wordle or something.
00:17:59 Kent
Yeah, so I want to give you a penalty card for being unconventional, because Worth the Time is typically for books, TV, and movies. But this is brilliant and so true, and I know where this is coming from. People getting, because of the state of the world and what we learned from that, psychologists, like,
00:18:20 Kent
So stuck in patterns that just don't work or distracting by doom scrolling. And yes, I've seen like playing games, stimulate the brain. And at the same time, I've seen all the ahas that have come from you after you've worked on a crossword or while you're working on a crossword, you just have to get your brain in a different mode. So I'm going to give you a total path. Thanks for listening to the No Vacation Required podcast.
00:18:50 Kent
For more information, including services designed to help you build a life you don't need a break from, check out novacationrequired.com. And if you found this information helpful, please subscribe.