There Is No "Right Time." There Is Only Now, Plus Courage.

There is a persistent fantasy that somewhere, just beyond the fog, a "right time" is waiting. A moment when the probabilities stack neatly, when uncertainty thins to a tolerable margin, when the imaginary committee inside your head unanimously votes "go." It’s an appealing idea - it flatters our desire for control. It lets us pretend that indecision is a form of virtue, that caution will one day ripen into certainty without cost.

But there is no "right time."

There is only now, plus courage.

Courage has been deeply misbranded in the age of alpha male influencers and masculinity grift. Contrary to popular belief, it is not the absence of fear; it's the decision to move alongside it. If you think about it in probabilistic terms, courage is what happens when you act even though your confidence interval is embarrassingly wide.

The wisdom of "waiting for the right time" suggests that courage should be reserved for moments when success feels inevitable. It's like waiting to jump out of the airplane until you're sure you can grow wings and fly.

Everything that matters - everything that has ever mattered - was dreamed up, accomplished and built by people who acted under conditions of severe uncertainty. The foundational mythologies, the inventions, the revolutions — all carried out by humans squinting into the blur of incomplete information and deciding to leap anyway. In retrospect, we call it vision. At the time, it probably looked a lot like foolishness.

The emotional core of delayed action is fear dressed up in strategic language. Fear that if you move too soon, you'll fail; fear that if you wait long enough, the risk will dissolve. But risk is a structural feature of reality, not a glitch to be patched. No amount of waiting will unroll the future into a safe and navigable map. You can't hedge your way into certainty.

If you model your life decisions with any degree of objectivity, you have to accept that after a point, further information adds almost nothing. You can iterate forever in the theoretical space without generating a better result in the real one. Analysis paralysis is not a clever use of time. It’s an epistemic graveyard where momentum goes to die.

Now is the only prior you actually have. You can spend infinite cycles refining your expected value calculations, but eventually you face a terminal choice: act, or don't. Build the castle out of sand, or wait for granite that never comes.

We imagine that courage is a high-drama, cinematic event. It’s not. Courage is statistical: it’s the slow, grinding willingness to make decisions under conditions of irreducible uncertainty. It’s the refusal to defer your life to the imaginary committee of "later."

There will be no signal from the sky, no meta-analysis delivered to your doorstep proving that now is optimal.

There will only be you, deciding whether to move anyway.