Ryan's Rules #50: Some jobs require dry weather, most just require an indifference to getting wet.

In any given month in the year I can look out my window and there’s a good chance that it will be raining. Some days it feels like it’s been raining for months on end. This is the price we pay for living in a country so lush and green.I’ll sit there and think, “I could be doing something in the garden right now” or maybe I’ll have a short day dream about a little project I could take care of. As someone who sits behind a desk for a living, I catch myself doing this and know exactly what it means. Ask anyone in the trades what they do when it’s raining and they’ll tell you that they get on with it, because they have to and because it’s just a part of the job. And ultimately, this isn’t about being soft or a wizened, gnarled, burly worker who doesn’t care what nature throws at them. This is about whether or not you wait for motivation to strike or whether you have the discipline to start something. This isn’t about the weather, is it? It’s about action, not a line about meteorology.

Stop Waiting for Perfect Conditions. Most Success Happens in the Rain.

Maybe you have a great idea, a side project or a career change you've been turning over in your mind for months. You're almost ready. You're just waiting for the right time. For things to settle down at work. For the kids to be a bit older, better able to look after themselves. For the economy to stabilise. For the stars to align.

While you're waiting though, someone else ships the product, takes the job, starts the company. The one you were going to. They didn't have it any better than you. They probably didn’t even have the same resources or knowledge as you do. They just decided that good enough conditions were sufficient and went for it. They showed an indifference to getting wet. An impatience for perfection to manifest. A moment where they said “F*** this noise” and did it anyway.

There's a name for what stops you from doing the same. Call it “precondition thinking.” The belief that something has to be solved or just right or true before something else can begin. It feels like it’s the work itself. It's not. 

I understand the impulse to wait for things to be favourable. Chasing the perfect moment can be like getting the perfect bite of food. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does… However, when it comes to perfection, you will tell yourself little lies. These lies masquerade as diligence, preparation, professionalism. You're not ready yet. You're doing more research. Waiting until you have more confidence, more money, more time, more clarity. The details need to be sorted before the bigger stuff can come together.

This precondition thinking attempts to get everything right before you do something. You’re identifying requirements. Constraints have to be considered. You need to understand the bare minimum that you need before the problem can really be solved.

Everything that is blocking your progress is a preference that’s pretending to be a requirement.

Waiting for perfection doesn't just delay success. It actually degrades your capacity to succeed when conditions do improve. If you had shipped in the rain, clumsily, with a substandard setup, you’d have ten months of real experience. What do you get from waiting, ten months of readiness?

The frustrating thing is that the more you do this, the more you feel like you’re making headway. You’re building in stealth. Once this thing gets to market, once the project is started, it’s going to be amazing. This process, however, is really you attaching action to something that will never arrive. It’s a waste of time. Procrastination in disguise. Every week you wait, or every new risk you try to mitigate, the imagined optimal moment becomes further away. It’s like saying “I was going to…” in response to your parents asking why your room wasn’t tidied. It’s not much use to you, or them, and the room still isn’t tidy.

To be fair, sometimes you do need dry weather. There are genuinely weather-dependent tasks. Pouring concrete in a downpour is counterproductive for one thing. But truly figuring out whether a task needs dry weather or not requires you to stop, take a step back and assess the lies, half-truths and truths you have told yourself. Most of these are part of the first two categories and not the last.

The Two Categories of Work

Simplifying everything into a binary dry weather vs who cares is an oversimplification. Generally things exist on a spectrum rather than one or the other. But you’re trying to get things done. So bear with me. If you want to get moving and take action you have to make it that simple. Either you start or you don’t. Not, you’ve started but you’re really just pretending.

You can use the 80/20 rule as verification. If you have 10 tasks and more than 2 of them require dry weather, you’re either actually pouring concrete or you’re convincing yourself the task is harder than it actually is.

Perhaps, even, it’s not the work that is actually holding you back. Maybe it’s just getting started. There’s a lovely phrase in Irish that goes “Tús maith, leath na hoibre.” It means “a good start is half the work.” I think this ageless piece of wisdom talks to the inertia of starting a task. The first five minutes. The getting up off the couch bit. Once you’re past that initial hump, you will often find that the motion required to overcome the inertia keeps you going for longer than you expected.

20% - Work That Genuinely Requires Dry Weather

Dry weather work may be less than 20% but is highly unlikely to be more than that. These are tasks with hard technical dependencies. A sterile environment, regulations to adhere to, safety measures, specific legal filings that come with stringent deadlines etc

If you proceed with this work without addressing these dependencies, the outcome will be objectively worse or even downright dangerous. Not uncomfortable or awkward or harder. Materially lesser.

80% - Work That Just Requires Getting A Bit Wet

Almost everything else the weather is aside from the point. Writing, selling, building, designing, managing, teaching, creating. The quality of your outputs in these tasks are not set by conditions. They’re held back by a lack of sustained effort and iteration. The false desire for perfection before starting gives you an excuse to not put in effort or put in the wrong effort. From there it doesn’t matter if you iterate. Working on the wrong thing brings you further away from your goal instead of closer to it. So, pick the right thing, even if you suck at it. Try get a little less sucky at it over time, until eventually you aren’t.

Your first draft written down is better than the draft never written. A sales call made when you're not feeling 100% can still close a deal. Even if it doesn’t close the deal, it can progress it. And if that deal was going to be lost, trust me, waiting or ignoring it would have lost the deal for you anyway. Even a business launched in a difficult economic climate can still find its footing. History is crammed with evidence to support this assertion. JK Rowling drafted Harry Potter as a single mother on benefits. Disney survived a war, a studio split, and a near-bankruptcy before it made Cinderella. It wasn’t a little bit of rain hindering these examples, was it? The work got done anyway.

There are some easy steps to get started and begin to make progress.

Without knowing how big your task is, setting a completion date will not help you. It might just discourage you. Set a start date. Tomorrow is good, today is better. The start date is when you will start regardless of anything else. Ask someone you know to hold you accountable. If you don’t know anyone, set a calendar reminder.

Start with one small step. Make one call, write one page, send one email.

If you’re still struggling you spend one hour defining the problem. Some requirements are real. The rest are not. Know the difference. If, at the end of the hour, you don’t have a solid grasp on the topic, put it aside and come back to it the next day. Your subconscious will work on the problem for you overnight.

When you still need to be convinced… write down the condition(s) you think you need. If this perfect state never arrived, would it make the work impossible or just uncomfortable? Answer this honestly. If you’re afraid of a bit of discomfort then abandon the idea entirely. Close your browser and don’t finish this article. It isn’t for you.

The Waiting Game Will Kill Things

Waiting is not a neutral act. It feels passive, but it has an active cost. Forget your imagined competitor building their skills - that is another excuse. Forget the shifting market. Without being on the market you cannot possibly know it. The gap between "now" and "later" is not empty. 

The biggest thing you are breeding by waiting is a psychological toll. Chronic waiting builds anxiety instead of readiness. It’s the Sunday night dread. The feeling that nothing will work, everything is wrong and incomplete is the best your project will ever be. The longer the gap, the heavier the imagined task becomes.

Skill, confidence, and momentum are all built through action. Some say perfect practice makes perfect. Maybe, maybe not. You and I both know that any practice with good intention and a little help from time to time will get you to good. Perfect isn’t where you are going nor where you need to be. Strive for perfection and you’ll convince yourself to give up before you've started.

Indifference to getting wet is not indifference to quality. It is the understanding that quality emerges from iteration, and to iterate you first need to start.

So Pick Up Your Tools

Most of us are not surgeons scrubbing in before an operation. We're writers, builders, founders, and professionals who have confused preferences for prerequisites. The rain is coming. In one form or another, it’s always going to be less than ideal. The work that defines careers, companies, and creative lives is almost never done in the sunshine. It is done by people who decided that a little wet was part of the deal. Grab a rain jacket and get moving.

Think about the one thing you've been holding back on until things improve. What would it look like to start it this week? Leave your answer in the comments if you like but more importantly answer this for yourself. This will be more useful than the ideal moment you've been waiting for.