I knew exactly what I wanted to make. A podcast, in Kurdish, with the people actually building businesses here. I had the idea, I had a rough plan, and I had picked a date to start.
I also had one particular person in mind for the first episode. Someone whose name would have opened the whole thing properly.
He did not have time.
So I waited for him. And I want to be honest about what that waiting actually was, because at the time it did not feel like avoidance. It felt responsible. It felt like judgement. I was not procrastinating, I was waiting for the right moment, and the right moment had a name and a face and a legitimate reason for being busy.
Eleven months.
Then I started without him.
We have now recorded twenty episodes. That guest still has not had the time, and I have made peace with the possibility that he never will. Here is the part I think about: if I had kept waiting, I would have nothing today. No episodes, no audience, no guests who came because they had already heard the ones before them. Just the same good idea, eleven months older, with the same very good reason attached to it.
The obstacle was real. That is what makes this worth writing about. It was not laziness and it was not fear of failure, or at least not fear I could see. It was one genuine problem that I quietly promoted into a condition for starting.
That is how it usually works. Almost nobody sits down and decides not to start. What happens is that something real gets in the way, and instead of going around it, you decide to wait for it to move. And because the obstacle is real, the waiting feels justified, sometimes for years.
So here is what I would say to anyone sitting where I sat.
Look hard at the thing you are waiting for. Not at whether it is a real problem, because it probably is. Ask a different question: if this never resolves, does the business never happen? If the answer is yes, you have a genuine dependency and you should go and solve it directly. If the answer is no, then you are not waiting. You are choosing, and calling it waiting.
Start at a smaller size instead of a later date. I could have recorded episode one with someone less famous. That is exactly what I eventually did. The first version of anything is allowed to be smaller than the version in your head, and the smaller version is what teaches you how to make the bigger one.
Understand that the obstacle may never move. This is the part people find hardest. You are waiting for a person, or a budget, or a market condition, and you have assumed it will eventually arrive. It might not. Build the thing that works without it.
Nothing about those eleven months made the podcast better. The equipment was the same. My questions were not sharper. The only difference between month one and month twelve was that I had finally stopped negotiating with myself.
Start, and leave the obstacle behind you. It will not always move, and you do not need it to.