"if you continue to wait until you're ready, you'll be waiting for the rest of your life"
~ steven barlett
I came across with an IG post somewhere along these lines, it's worth sharing.
The cost of ambition:
- late nights, early mornings
- lots of associates, very few friends
- you will be single unless you are lucky enough to find someone who understands your lifestyle
- people will want you to do good, but never better than them
For these reasons, you will do many things along.
It's hard i know, it's difficult-yes, that's given.
It's all in the mind: those thoughts, when chances are seemingly so small to succeed, and yet, if you crush those thoughts pulling down your ambitions, or your dreams; and replace it with the "push", you're on the right track because no one is going to do that, but you!
Pero siguro that is the hardest part to accept—that motivation is not something we stumble upon, but something we manufacture in isolation.
We spend so much time waiting for the right conditions. The right mood. The right sign. The right person to believe in us before we believe in ourselves. Subalit 'yung readiness na tinatawag, as the quote suggests, is often just a more polite name for fear. A delay disguised as prudence o pagiging "cautious mashado". A way of postponing discomfort while telling ourselves we are being responsible.
The truth is, most meaningful things begin without permission.
Ambition rarely arrives with reassurance. It arrives as restlessness. As dissatisfaction with the present. As the quiet feeling that something in your life is unfinished and calling for attention. And that call is usually answered alone.
Late nights are not romantic. They are silent. Early mornings are not heroic. They are heavy. The loneliness that comes with pursuing something uncertain does not feel noble in the moment—it feels isolating. There are fewer people to talk to, fewer places to belong. Even success, when it begins to appear, feels strangely empty without familiar faces to witness it.
This is the hidden cost of ambition: you grow, but not always together with the people you started with.
And yet, what choice is there? To wait for collective approval is to surrender agency. To depend on external motivation is to live reactively. Eventually, ma-rerealize natin na, no one will arrive to validate our hunger for more. No one will knock on our door and say, “It’s time for you to try.”
Ikaw... Tayo... lang ang makakapagsabi nun sa sarili mo..., natin.
The mind becomes the real battlefield. Not between talent and failure, but between persistence and self-doubt. Every day presents a choice: to indulge the voice that lists reasons to stop, or to cultivate the one that insists on movement, even without clarity.
The push, as you described it, is not loud. It does not feel like confidence. It feels like showing up without certainty. It feels like acting while afraid. It feels like continuing despite the absence of applause.
Motivation, in this sense, is not inspiration—it is discipline disguised as belief. And maybe that is what growing up actually looks like. Not finding the perfect reason to begin, but accepting that the beginning itself is the reason. Choosing to move before you feel ready. To act before you feel capable. To trust that momentum will follow effort, not the other way around.
Because at the end of the day, the most uncomfortable truth is also the most liberating one:
No one is coming to save you from hesitation. No one is coming to hand you certainty. No one is coming to live your potential for you. You either become the source of your own motivation—or you remain a spectator of your own life.
~ billymac ®shortstories
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