What Happens In-Between?
I just closed an email response from a potential client who told me they’d be making a decision on who to hire at the end of August.
Yesterday, a potential client told me they’d be revisiting my proposal in Q4 and to check back in early November.
I have about 15 outstanding proposals to potential clients at the moment — a few very large projects and several smaller ones. All of them in someone else’s hands and here I am left waiting for that fateful “yes” or “no” email.
We all wait. We wait for the Barista to make our latte. We wait for our car to be fixed at the auto-body shop. We wait in line at the grocery store. We wait to get a diagnosis from the family doctor. Waiting is a part of life.
But all of this waiting doesn’t make the waiting any easier. Tom Petty tells us that the “waiting is the hardest part”. I concur.
But it’s what happens in the waiting — during the in-between, that defines who you are, where you go, and what you find that you’re capable of.
I’m not here to complain about waiting — given my line of work as the owner of a service-based creative firm, it’s kind of what I signed up for. Managing the ebb and flow of insane, fast-paced, “go-go-go” days and those slower moments of waiting for the next big project to hit is par for the course.
I’ve learned over the past 7–8 years that the waiting — and what you do during that time, defines success. Let the anxiety of waiting get to you, and it will absolutely cripple your productivity, your ability to manage, your present perception of reality, and your attention to future goals.
Success, momentum, and growth happens during the in-between. When instinct tells you to wait, and hope, and pray — you keep moving. You keep meeting. You keep writing proposals. You keep grinding. You keep hustling. You flat-out just keep going.
Everything you’re waiting for will come around — sometimes with the response you want, and sometimes not. It’s easy to place an insane and sometimes unhealthy level of importance on those decisive “yes” or “no” moments, but the moments that matter most are the minutes, hours, days, months, sometimes years that happen in-between.
