Undergraduate students are caught in a characterization paradox.
They are far too young to take seriously but much too old to justify their often-poor decisions. My memories of those years are rife with confusing and complicated times, hiding uncertainties under a heavy veil of self-assuredness and extroversion.
That overwhelming period was when I began telling myself, usually in bouts of frustration, “Oh, just go for it.” Take the plunge. You’ll never get anywhere if you don’t get moving now.
I forced myself into this attitude sometime during those four years, frustrated by time wasted weighing decisions about classes, career paths, and friendships. I was tired of agonizing over the future and sick of blurring the anxiety with bars and bonfires.
Go with your gut became my mantra, repeated constantly in those confusing days of young adulthood. And once I started living up to it, I became a more successful and happier person. I traded in my pros and cons lists for jumping headfirst into whatever decision I felt was best at the moment.
Was it perfect? Not even close. But even though things haven’t always worked out exactly as expected, every decision culminated in the happy chapter I’m in now.
The secret of getting ahead is getting started.
- Mark Twain
My first classroom sported a little sign with this quote, embodying one of my most important lessons learned. Most (all) of my tenth graders didn’t know who Mark Twain was, but the concept was straightforward.
The secret of getting ahead is getting started. In other words, stop messing around and just do it. Get the job done. Move forward.
It was good advice for students who linger, pens hovering, sweating over the perfect first sentence in a writing assignment. Or for the procrastinators who complete 15 unimportant tasks before starting the project due tomorrow.
But, more so, it is good advice for anyone in a period of transition.
We can spend our entire lives floundering in the could-be or should-have-been. We procrastinate life transitions because they are difficult to face, or we aren’t sure if we are doing the right thing. We stay rooted to the spot, frozen in time, too timid to move forward but with nowhere else to go.
Except, we aren’t really frozen in time. Time does not wait for us to make our difficult choices. So, at best, we are standing still while the world moves on without us. At worst, we are moving backward, stuck in the painful limbo of neither here nor there.
I’ll admit, plunging into frightening life transitions is not always a walk in the park. I left a promising career in financial services to become a public high school teacher in NYC. I worked my butt off to pay that tuition out of pocket, only to leave tenure on the table to stay home with my children a few years later.
Both of those decisions were scary, made with a “go with your gut” mentality, and they might not make sense to someone else — But I have never regretted either. Not even for a moment.
Let’s keep following the crazy train… Last year I opened an LLC to start freelance writing. Then, that turned into consulting and writing for small businesses. Which turned into curriculum writing and consulting for teachers. Now, I focus every spare minute on creative writing and hope to permanently wrap up everything else before baby #2 arrives in a few months.
Why am I reciting this whirlwind saga of my back-and-forth decisions of the past few years? Well, to emphasize that getting started does not necessarily mean a straight shot to where you want to be.
But, if you don’t get moving, you might never get there at all. If I hadn’t made that first seemingly insane decision to go back to school to be a teacher, who knows where I’d be now. It’s unknowable. That’s life.
So, if you’re in limbo, consider this your little push to get out of it. Take the plunge. Make the choice and commit to it. Because it’s time to move forward.
After all, as a wise author once said, the secret of getting ahead is getting started.
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