There is a sentence I said often during fifteen years in banking, mostly to myself: once this is behind me, then.
Once the integration is complete. Once the division is running. Once the children are past the hardest years. Once I'm far enough along financially to afford it — then I'll take the time for what actually matters to me.
For a long time I believed that was prudence. You wait until conditions are right — what could be wrong with that.
What is interesting is the mechanism behind it. Almost no one consciously decides against their own life. They only postpone it. And they do so with a justification that feels reasonable: now is not the right moment.
The treacherous thing about that sentence is that it is true. It really never is the right moment. Whoever waits until their career is secure finds that their parents then need care. Whoever waits until the company is running steadily finds the next reason in the market environment. The right moment is not a point in time. It is a construction that spares us a decision we are afraid of.
So what is usually missing is not the moment. It is the courage.
There is a record of this I have never forgotten. The Australian palliative nurse Bronnie Ware spent years with the dying and noted what those people regretted at the end. At the top of the list is not having achieved too little. At the top is the wish to have lived a life on their own terms rather than to others' expectations. It is not a list about mistakes. It is a list about postponement.
The objection to this is legitimate, and I don't want to skip past it: there is such a thing as genuine waiting. Sometimes a decision really is not ripe, because a piece of information is missing that can still be obtained, or because a date is approaching that will settle something. The difference can be tested, and the test takes a minute. Whoever waits sensibly can say what they are waiting for and how they will know the time has come. Whoever waits from a lack of courage cannot. They can only explain why not now.
I recognize it in myself by a particular number: from the third round over the same detail onward, it is no longer diligence. It is avoidance with a good reputation.
With my clients the same pattern looks different, but it is the same. There is always a decision that has been due for months. Parting with a managing director who no longer fits. The conversation with the co-founder that has been overdue for two years. Exiting a line of business everyone considers dead and no one buries. Outwardly it is justified with diligence, with missing data, with the wrong point in the cycle. Inwardly, everyone knows.
And while you wait, the matter keeps working. The good people in the division notice first. They don't draw conclusions, they withdraw. A postponed decision never costs only time. It costs energy in everyone who made the decision long ago and is waiting for someone to say it out loud.
I resigned in 2011 without knowing what would come next. That was not brave, it was overdue. The difference between those two words is about a year.
Courage, you see, is not the ability to act at the right moment. Courage is the willingness to act at the wrong one, because there is no right one.