There’s a moment, right before any serious attempt, when preparation stops helping and starts being an excuse.
I see it clearly in sport. You can train for months on a movement, study the technique, watch videos, fine-tune every detail — but there’s always a point where the only way to know if it works is to actually try it, with the real risk of falling, mistiming it, or bruising something, your pride included.
Preparation reduces risk, it doesn’t remove it. And that’s the trade-off: the more time you spend preparing, the safer you feel, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re getting more ready — sometimes you’re just postponing the moment where you find out whether you are.
I’ve noticed that attempting something teaches things no amount of preparation can teach in advance. Your body reacting differently than you expected. Fear showing up somewhere you hadn’t accounted for. Balance lost for some silly, ordinary reason no video ever showed you.
Failing, in that moment, isn’t the opposite of progress. It’s the part of progress that preparation alone can never give you.
The same thing happens at work, just with different consequences. When you try a new technology, a different approach, an idea you’ve never tested — you can read documentation, look at examples, ask for opinions. But sooner or later theory runs out, and all that’s left is the code that won’t compile, the decision that turns out wrong, the project that needs to be redone.
The trade-off is always the same: how much time do you invest in preparing versus how much do you leave for the attempt itself? Prepare too little and you fail out of naivety. Prepare too much and you still fail, just later, having burned precious time putting it off.
I don’t think there’s a fixed balance point. It shifts with experience, with what’s at stake, with how reversible the mistake you’re risking actually is.
What I’ve learned is that preparation should get you to the starting line, not the finish line. From there on, it’s up to the attempt — and everything that can go wrong, which is really what shows you how things actually are.
Failing, once you’ve prepared just enough, isn’t a waste. It’s the only way I know to turn theory into something real.