Are you living life hard enough?
I think "the right time" is a myth we tell ourselves to avoid doing the scary thing today.
We are always thinking about later, once the kids are older, once there’s a bit more cushion in the bank account, once things calm down… once, once, once.
But the right time is a moving target
The right time to do all the things: switch careers, start the business, have the hard conversation, make the leap — never actually shows up on schedule. Once you hit that milestone, there’s already a new "right time" waiting on the other side of it.
I see this constantly with the parents I coach. They're waiting for a review cycle to pass, for a kid to start school, for the next promotion to land — and then, when it finally does, there's a brand-new reason to wait a little longer.
The goalposts move because "the right time" didn’t really have to do with logistics, it’s more so fear, wearing a very practical-sounding disguise.
Ripping the “right time” myth apart
Years of coaching parents have taught me that when someone finally gets unstuck is rarely a perfectly-timed decision. Something happens, like a layoff, a hard year, an unexpected call…
Literally anything can rip that “right time” fantasy away and it just leaves you standing there with just… now.
That something is what tends to be the gift, what collapses the waiting and what forces the question "someday" always let you avoid: if not now, when?
Living harder, not just longer
To me, living life harder means living with intention instead of on autopilot. Doing the thing you've whispered to a friend over dinner instead of filing it under "eventually." Picking your head up out of the spreadsheet of your own life and asking whether it actually adds up to something you want.
It's uncomfortable. It should be a little uncomfortable.
Comfortable is what had you waiting in the first place.
Want more of this?
Sam Rayner spent years building a successful corporate marketing career, quietly waiting for the right time to build something of her own — until a string of hard, unplanned moments made the decision for her instead. Her mother's dying words to her were "you need to live life harder," and Sam has built her entire second act around them: she closed her first business, called it a pause instead of a failure, and used everything she learned in that pause to build Maris Dae, a seaweed skincare brand made entirely in Vancouver.
