If you’re successful, there is a point when you’ll probably realise nobody is coming to give you permission.
Not the board or your business partner.
Nor your wife or your kids.
Certainly not your financial adviser
It won’t be the younger version of yourself who set the whole thing in motion twenty or thirty years ago.
For years, permission can look practical. It did for me.
I’ll think about things after the next deal. After my earn-out.
After the kids leave home. The mortgage is gone.
The number. The next role. Or the diary calms down.
Waiting sounds sensible. Responsible, even.
But underneath it, there is often a deeper hope that one day the conditions will become so clear that the decision will no longer feel like a decision you have to make.
At that point, you hope there will be no risk or difficult conversation or need to disappoint anyone.
And you hope there’ll be no need to admit that the life you built is no longer the life you want to keep living in the same way.
But the Home Straight rarely begins with perfect conditions.
It begins when you stop outsourcing permission and stop waiting for life to make the question safe.
You will stop treating responsibility as a reason to postpone truth.
The honest questions you will ask yourself are: what am I waiting for?
Who am I waiting to approve this? What has the waiting already cost me?
What would I choose if I stopped needing the whole next chapter mapped out?
Photo by Sidharth Shivshankar on Unsplash