There’s No Such Thing As “Falling Behind,” So Stop Stressing That You’re Not Doing Enough


The way in which age and timing plays into our ongoing fantasies about how successful we will be and when is twisted. But it’s not even just wrong, it’s limiting, it’s short-sighted, and it’s ultimately holding you back.

Some of the most accomplished icons of our time did not create their most remarkable work until decades after they began. This is normal, and happens for obvious reasons: what you do in your early 20s is barely your foundation, it’s not the whole of what you’re here to accomplish. You’re just getting started. So the pressure to feel as though you’re not performing constantly, and well enough? It’s some self-sabotaging BS.

There is absolutely no such thing as “falling behind.” There is no such thing as “falling behind.” Just as no two people are the same, no two lives unfold at the exact same pace. Easing into your own timeline will help you do better, it will help you get farther, it will help you become more of who you are here to be.

Who cares if it took you an extra decade to discover what you really want to do? Who is to say it didn’t take all of those years to work on an undeveloped part of your personal life, one that would have held you back when you finally arrived at your revelation? Who is to say that everything you have been through and every wrong choice you made hasn’t ultimately taught you something so invaluable about your future success, you won’t look back with overwhelming gratitude that you messed up when things were easier to untangle?

But most of all, who taught you that the purpose of your life was to arrive perfected, and complete? Who made you think that until you have reached the tip of whatever mountain you’ve decided to scale, you haven’t really become who you are?

Every day is the becoming. All of the time. Art doesn’t make you an artist, life makes you an artist, you create when you decide to take what you know and how you feel and materialize it in a way all of the world can see.

If you want to do more, do more. If you want to do less, do less. But know that either way, your timeline is not linear, because it’s not built around how well you can perform and how often. It’s built around what it’s going to take to make you the best and most whole version of yourself, a process from which all of the great things you will create in your life will unfold.