To those who say “Now or Never”- a perspective you never saw it with
Be honest, how many times have you heard your over enthusiastic friend preaching, “If not now, then when?” or “Now or never”? We all have that one friend, don’t we?
Now or never is like salt in your food. It’ll be healthy and tasty if you include it in your pizza, but if you replace it with sugar in cupcakes, you’re done for. It’s needed, but at the right time. Indeed “If not now, then when?” has actually helped many people overcome their fears and finally find the courage to do what they’ve always wanted to, but couldn’t for some reason. But did they find it at the right time? Not earlier, not later? Did they regret after they succumbed to the pressure of following their dreams and going ahead with whatever they wanted to do? We all have been constantly fed this idea that if something didn’t happen at the right point in our lives because of us, it will never really happen. But let’s ask ourselves: Does it really reduce the chances of us achieving our dreams to zero, just because we didn’t throw it all in the bin and did what we wanted to without second, rational thoughts? Does impulsively quitting on our jobs guarantee that we’d be able to achieve our dreams? The job you earned after so much efforts for so many years: right from schooling all through your high school and college, should be taken for granted? The very job that’s been helping you sustain yourself after you moved out from your parents’ house, the job that’s helped you explore, that’s provided you and will continue to provide so much exposure, is holding you back from achieving your dreams?
Think about it, the job that you’re blaming for your one sided love with your dreams, is actually a fortune. It’s only aiding you in your journey. You’ll realize you learned and gained a lot from that job without which you might have be just as vulnerable as an innocent victim of bullying at junior school. You might look back and recognize how it actually made you better prepared to step into your dream field — a new world. The experience you gain now will help you smartly tackle the new challenges life will have to offer. You will be able to trouble shoot quicker, easier and better.
‘Now or never' tells you, deceptively, that achieving your dreams depends only on how impulsively you act, without considering other important factors at work, because you wouldn’t want to be wasting your time. It’s like telling a 16 year old girl that if she doesn’t conceive a baby now, she never will. That doesn’t make any sense, right? Sure life is short, but we can’t do everything in a single day because everything is uncertain and we may die any moment, can we?
Many people who advocate this theory use the “regret strategy”. It goes like: “Won’t you regret later in life, (preferably) in your old age (because you can’t do nothing once you’re ‘old’), wishing if you had had just enough courage to take that one decision? Your whole life would’ve turned out different and more like how you wanted it to be. You’d work like an ox your whole life and yet die with wishes unfulfilled.”
It’s a good way, really, and I must say quite an effective one, to help overcome our fears, find the courage to do something worth it or quit giving in to self doubt, letting the society or that little voice in our head tell us what we can’t do. But let’s stop for a second, and think: Shouldn’t we think it through before we start on a new journey and an extremely important one at that? Weigh the chances, calculate the risks, check the industry progress, plan a backup before handing in your resignations might be some things you’d want to consider.
Let me ask you a question: Do you type in an email and send it the second you sign it, without re-reading it for grammatical or spelling mistakes, or to check if you left out something very important to mention? And the reason being that that you were afraid of either dying the next second without being able to hit send; or the internet may start giving you a hard time till the very last moment you could send that email. Is it just me or does that sound equally ridiculous to you as well?
It’s like: to avoid regrets, lemme just invite (sometimes) even more regrets and distress. Imagine if you find out later that you forgot to attach your CV in the email and sent it straight away without noticing and that was your last chance to apply in your dream company? So, to avoid the regret of not being able to send that email at all, you invited more, even bigger regrets. Situations like these rarely happen, but just to make it easier for you to realize how absurd it all sounds, using such an example was necessary.
Things happen when they are bound to. Everything has its own right time and that might not correspond well with your perception of right time. We should stop provoking people to take the right decisions at the wrong time.
But it doesn’t, in all certainties, mean that you let all the opportunities that knock on your sweet little door, go unanswered. In conclusion, Now or never is a prescription that can cure your fever but has its own complications if prescribed under inappropriate conditions.
