The best time to start

was yesterday.

The day before that, even. Scratch that: If you’d started last week, a few months back, a year ago when the idea first hit your head, you’d already have some traction. You’d be on second base, at least.

But that was then, and this is now. You didn’t do it then—and that’s fine. Odds are you did some pretty great stuff instead.

And now it’s today, and it’s the best time to start.

There will never be a better time, in fact. You take a step today, and tomorrow you’ll be ready to take the next step. You write something today, it’ll be there for someone to read tomorrow, fall in love with, and follow you for the next great thing you’ll publish. Google will get a head-start indexing it today, so it’ll be ready when someone searches for it next month.

Your brain will say no, you should have done this before, and now it’s pointless, and look at everyone else who has already done the things and is so far ahead.

And, yeah, good point brain. But if you don’t do it now, you’ll just be stuck in the same old loop tomorrow, next week, next year. And your brain will still be saying too late, should have done it back then, but now...

Bygones are bygones.

And here’s a secret: You’re not too late.

Coke’s 129 years old. Nintendo’s 132. Apple’s 45. Twitter’s 15. TikTok’s 5.

Oceans rise, empires fall, and companies rarely last long enough to see even part of the cycle. Today’s most venerated brands were, not all that long ago, not even a thing.

Then someone said, you know what, I’m just going to start making watches or sewing handbags or mixing sparkling sugar water or writing code, and it was so. It wasn’t overnight, but with that slow compounding of time, one bit of great work on top of another, the dream became a thing.

That slow, steady process is perhaps most clear online, where Google search rankings are there for anyone who will put in the work to claim them. The questions people google every day aren’t going to answer themselves; if you’ll show up and write what people are looking for, publish it consistently, over time your stuff will do well, will get traffic, will get discovered by the folks who need it most. It’ll take time; it took well over a year to get Capiche ranking first for its name, for instance. But it also didn’t take any tricks, didn’t take hiding links and doing shady SEO tricks. It was just publishing, showing up every day and putting more stuff on Capiche that we bet could rank well. And eventually Google said, you know what, Capiche is a thing. A thousand little commits, cashed in at once.

That’s what you’re kickstarting when you start today. It’ll still take time. Nothing’s built overnight.

But at least you started. The first brick’s laid down. The foundation’s there.

Tomorrow you can tell your brain, no really I actually did the thing yesterday, and today I can do it again.

And then it’ll be the best time to take the next step.

writing about writing.

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