I Waited 20 Years—Don't Make the Same Mistake

By Art Harrison • July 7, 2025

Twenty years of waiting for the "right time" taught me that perfect timing doesn't exist. The psychological cost of delaying your entrepreneurial dreams.

I had my first real business idea when I was 22. It was a good idea—not revolutionary, but solid. I could see exactly how to build it, who would buy it, and why it would work.

Instead of starting, I decided to wait. I wanted more experience first. More money saved. More industry connections. More confidence in my abilities.

I finally built that business when I was 42.

It worked exactly as I had imagined 20 years earlier. But here's the devastating part: it would have worked just as well when I was 22. All that waiting didn't make me more prepared—it just made me older.

Those 20 years cost me more than just the opportunity. They cost me the compound growth that comes from starting earlier, the experience that comes from building multiple businesses, and the confidence that comes from proving to yourself that you can create something from nothing.

The Perfect Timing Myth

The most seductive lie in entrepreneurship is that there's a "right time" to start. We tell ourselves we'll begin when we have enough money, enough experience, enough connections, enough confidence.

But perfect timing is a myth that keeps capable people waiting indefinitely.

There will never be a time when you have everything you think you need. There will never be a moment when all conditions align perfectly. There will never be a day when starting feels completely safe and certain.

The "right time" to start is always now, with whatever resources you currently have.

Why Waiting Feels Rational

Waiting feels responsible because you can always identify legitimate reasons why starting now isn't optimal:

You don't have enough capital saved
Your current job is too demanding for a side business
The market timing isn't perfect
You need more skills or experience first
Your personal situation isn't stable enough

All of these concerns are valid. But they'll still be valid next year, and the year after that. There will always be reasons to wait.

Meanwhile, someone with worse timing, less preparation, and fewer resources is building the business you're planning to build someday.

The Compound Cost of Delay

What I didn't understand at 22 was that entrepreneurial delay has compound costs that get exponentially more expensive over time.

Financial Compound Cost

Starting at 22 instead of 42 doesn't just give you 20 extra years of business building—it gives you 20 extra years of business building during your highest-energy decades, plus the compound growth of reinvesting early successes into bigger opportunities.

If I had started at 22 and built three businesses over 20 years instead of one business at 42, the financial difference would be measured in millions, not thousands.

Experience Compound Cost

Every business you build teaches you something that makes the next business easier and more likely to succeed. Starting earlier means more businesses, which means more education, which means better judgment, which means bigger successes.

The entrepreneur who starts their first business at 25 and their fourth business at 45 has massive advantages over the entrepreneur who starts their first business at 45, even if both are equally intelligent and motivated.

Confidence Compound Cost

Successfully building something from nothing creates unshakeable confidence in your ability to figure things out. This confidence enables you to pursue bigger opportunities and take calculated risks that cautious people avoid.

Waiting to feel confident before starting means you never develop the evidence-based confidence that only comes from actually building something.

The Age Advantage Nobody Mentions

Here's what I tell older entrepreneurs who feel like they've missed their opportunity: you haven't missed anything. You've gained something that younger entrepreneurs don't have—perspective.

At 42, I brought 20 years of professional experience, industry relationships, and life wisdom to my business that 22-year-old me couldn't have had.

The business I built at 42 was more sophisticated, more customer-focused, and more profitable than anything 22-year-old me could have created.

But—and this is crucial—it would have been even better if I had started at 22 and spent 20 years iterating and improving.

The Sweet Spot Strategy

If you're over 30 and feeling like you've waited too long, here's the truth: you're at the perfect age to combine youthful energy with mature judgment.

You have enough life experience to avoid beginner mistakes, but enough time left to build something significant. You understand what you don't want from work, which makes it easier to design what you do want.

Use your age as an advantage, not an excuse.

The Psychology of Perpetual Preparation

Why do smart people wait so long to start businesses they know they want to build?

Fear of inadequacy: "I'm not ready yet" often means "I'm afraid I'm not capable."

Fear of opportunity cost: "What if something better comes along?" keeps you from committing to current opportunities.

Fear of judgment: "What will people think if this doesn't work?" prevents you from risking your reputation on uncertain outcomes.

All of these fears are about protecting your current identity instead of building your future identity.

If you're dealing with career change anxiety that's keeping you in waiting mode, understand that the anxiety doesn't decrease with time—it increases. The longer you wait, the scarier change becomes.

How to Stop Waiting and Start Building

The cure for perpetual preparation isn't perfect planning—it's imperfect action.

The Two-Week Rule

Give yourself two weeks to take one meaningful action toward the business you've been planning. Not to complete anything—just to start something real.

This artificial deadline forces you to work with current conditions instead of waiting for ideal conditions.

The Minimum Viable Start

You don't need to build the complete business—you need to test the core assumption. Can you sell one unit of whatever you want to build? Can you get one customer to pay for a simplified version of your service?

Start with the smallest version of your idea that still provides real value to real customers.

The Anti-Perfectionist Pledge

Commit to starting with whatever level of preparation you currently have. Your first attempt won't be perfect, but it will be real. And real is better than perfect when perfect never happens.

Your Anti-Waiting Action Plan

Today: Set a firm deadline for taking one concrete action toward your business goal. Two weeks maximum.

This week: Share your business intention with someone who will hold you accountable to your deadline.

This month: Start building the minimum viable version of whatever you've been planning to build "someday."

If you need structured support moving from planning to action, the FSTEP program is specifically designed for people who are excellent at preparation but struggle with execution. You'll learn to channel your analytical strengths into building instead of endless planning.

Remember, the perfect time to start was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.

Stop waiting for conditions that will never be perfect. Start building with conditions that are good enough.

Your future self will thank you for starting today instead of waiting another year for slightly better circumstances.

The opportunity cost of waiting isn't just the business you don't build—it's the person you don't become through the experience of building it.

Ready to Take Action?

Stop planning and start building. Take the first step toward turning your ideas into reality.

Start the Free 5-Day Challenge View The Program

Video Transcript

My God, I wish I had thought about building audience earlier on in my life. I wish I realized that an audience really was a type of superpower, that it was leverage that money can't buy because an audience gives you freedom. It gives you the freedom to launch an idea without having to start a from scratch. It gives you the chance to find new opportunities or to have them find you without you having to cold call. That's massive. That's why major brands throughout the world are being completely disrupted, not by competitors with more money or a better marketing campaign, but just by people with a camera or a platform. People with an audience can launch things and the type of affinity, the type of connection they have with their audience means that their products outperform everything else. But the biggest mistake I made was not just not participating, although that was a pretty big one. It was also overthinking what having an audience really meant. A lot of us make the mistake. We associate audience with clout, with fame, we think about the views, we think about all the equipment that we have to have. I say as I set up here in my studio with all the lighting. But imagine that every week you do a little bit of work on it. You put something out there and over the next six months or a year you have 500 people that are paying attention. 500 people that open every email you write who genuinely care about you who are excited about all the tips you're sharing, all the advice you're giving, just imagine how much easier it will be when you are in a position to promote something. Maybe you have an idea for a book or you've written one, maybe you just need a job and you're looking for people that can be referrals. If you can reach out to those 500 people, how much better off would you be than someone who has never spent any time building audience? That's where I was before I started this channel. I regret it now, but for the past 20 years, I've been a consumer. I've been on all the platforms. I've been on LinkedIn and X, Instagram, TikTok, and here on YouTube. But all I was doing was watching other people's content. I was becoming the audience for other people, but I never contributed anything. I wouldn't even leave a Yelp review. And I absolutely regret that. I regret not being a participant. And I regret not documenting the things I went through. I've lived a pretty remarkable life. If I been talking about being a founder, starting a business, hiring our first employees, raising millions of dollars. Having to let people go, you know what that felt like. If I just shared all of that, imagine how better off I would be right now in terms of having an audience of people who had been with me on that journey, who wanted to see what was next. Who wanted to support me. That's why you have to start now. And starting doesn't have to be difficult. There's really a couple of key tips that I would say to anybody who's on the fence, who isn't sure that starting an audience is really right for them. The first is that an audience is just like networking. It's the new currency. You can go to every conference. You can grab business cards, put them in LinkedIn, but most of the people on LinkedIn don't really know you. I've got 3,000 contacts. I would recognize maybe about 100 of them if I saw them in line at Starbucks. The rest of them are just someone I spent a night with, someone who I met at a conference who we shared a laugh. But I'm not invested in them. They're not invested in me. They're just part of this rolodex. That's not really that valuable. But an audience is. And the best way to build an audience is to simply go wherever you already are. Go to the places you're already spending time where you are a consumer, where you're someone else's audience and start participating. That may sound like a lot, but it doesn't have to. You don't have to be a creator. You don't have to buy lights and cameras. You don't have to put your face on it. If you really don't want to, all you have to do is be open because there is always something you know that someone else would benefit from hearing. Think about wherever you are in your life. Whatever you're doing, you've learned something today, this week, this year. There's someone who hasn't learned that yet. So just go to those platforms and share things. And yeah, it may seem trivial to you now. That's how knowledge works. Whatever you learn something, it no longer seems important. But there's someone else right now that is desperate to hear that same information. I recommend three types of posts. If you are willing to take me up on this offer, you're thinking that this will actually be beneficial to your idea to your life, just to experiment, to get better at creating an audience now so you don't have to scramble to do it later on, then just pick one of these three topics and go today right after this video and just post on. The first is my favorite, but it's also maybe the most difficult for other people is Sheriff failure. I'm a huge proponent of talking about my failures, turning them into stories because personally it gives me power. When I talk about the things that went wrong, I learn the lessons from them. I own them. They no longer become an embarrassment to me. They're just something funny I tell. So I recommend that you just go out and share something that you fail that. Something that went wrong because someone will learn a lesson from it. I'll give you an example. My favorite failure story to tell. I don't think I've told that I'm video before is the time when I was 22 years old that I destroyed about six months of work. Completely destroyed. It was not recoverable whatsoever. What happened was at the time it was before we had cloud and backups. You know, I'm in my 40s now. So I had been working for six months to build a social network. And my computer was running slow. I decided that I was going to be safe. I was going to back everything up. So I took what little money I had. I bought a DVD burner and some blank DVDs that I can just store the information on a disk. I never had one before though. So after I copied all my code, all the files onto that. I decided that I would delete or format my computer so that I would hopefully run faster. And then because I was being safe, I got out of a pen and I wrote on the DVD back up number one very important. But it didn't show up really well. So I just took that pen and I stroke after stroke, just kept writing until I can see the letters. What I didn't know was that a DVD is too side and as you're writing on it with a shop object on one side, you're actually scratching the other side. So at the end of that night, I had formatted with my computer. Everything was gone from there and I had scratched the only backup I had. That moment taught me so much about myself about resilience. It taught me that you can come back from just about anything because that night I cried a little. I had a drink. I went to bed. But I woke up the next day and I just started again. And I managed to write what I had done in six months, probably in about two because I already knew it. I had solved the hard problems. I think I did a better job. I think I was better off for doing it. That's one of my failure stories. I don't know why I like it so much, but I like the truth of it. I love the fact that at that moment I had dropped out of university, college, to try and create a startup. And after spending six months, I lost everything and yet it didn't stop me. That's a great story. And I know that when I tell it to people in person, people respond. They share their own stupid mistakes. And that's how we create a connection. And you can do the same in a blog, on LinkedIn, in a video form and start building it out in yourself. And if that one is a little uncomfortable for you, the other two that are much easier are to either share something you've learned, a tip, a trick, something that you just discovered that made your life a little bit better. Maybe it was an optimization. Maybe it's how to use Excel, but I don't really know what it is you're learning. But just share it with someone. Just say, hey, did you know that you can do this? And I bet you someone will say, that's amazing. Thank you so much. And the third is just to talk about your day. Talk about what you're going through. It may not seem impressive. But whatever you're doing, if you're a welder, if you're in HR, if you're just starting off into your career and looking for your first job, sharing what that experience is like. The feelings, the emotions, the good days and the bad days. That's what I'm starting to do more and more on this channel because people love seeing the process or process depends on what country you live in. They love the progress. They like seeing people overcome things. They love hearing about it because we all go through that. We all want to know that it's going to be okay. We're also really curious about how other people live, how they think what jobs are like. So if you're willing to just talk about that, you're giving a little piece of yourself, get your helping someone else out along the way. That's it. If you just go to a platform, you're on if you just share something personal, something real, something you learned, you're on the way to having an audience. And once you have that audience, everything in life will get easier for you. It doesn't matter how long you think about something. The end of the day, just trying it. Figuring out as you go is the single best way to actually figure out what's right for you. So get started. It doesn't matter how old you are. I bet you you're somewhere. If you're watching this, you're on YouTube. So that's one option. But I bet you you're on LinkedIn. I bet you read a blog. I bet you that there is a site that has a comment box to start contributing and see where that leads you. It may not be fast, but it will grow.