Are you successful or just planning to be?

We live in a culture obsessed with the appearance of progress. Scroll through LinkedIn and you'll see endless posts about "grinding," "hustling," and "staying busy." But beneath this performative layer lies a more uncomfortable truth: much of what we call progress is simply activity.

When Preparation Becomes Procrastination

The most seductive activity is preparation. It feels productive to spend weeks researching the perfect productivity system, to outline every possible scenario before starting a business, or to take course after course before ever creating something. Preparation has the psychological comfort of progress without the vulnerability of actually putting work into the world.

Real preparation has an endpoint—a moment when you transition from getting ready to actually doing. False preparation is circular, always finding new things that need to be researched, planned, or optimized before you can begin. It's procrastination wearing the mask of diligence.

Working Toward Success vs. Being Successful

There's a qualitative difference between someone actively working toward success and someone who has internalized what success actually requires. The person working toward success is often still negotiating with the process—looking for shortcuts, waiting for motivation, or hoping external circumstances will change. They're in a relationship with the idea of success.

Someone who has internalized success has moved beyond negotiation. They understand that the work itself is the point, not just a means to an end. They've stopped asking whether they feel like doing what needs to be done and started asking what needs to be done regardless of how they feel.

This isn't about being a workaholic or grinding yourself into burnout. It's about developing what psychologists call "task-focused coping"—the ability to engage with necessary work without requiring it to be pleasant, inspiring, or perfectly aligned with your mood.

The Uncomfortable Reality

True progress often looks boring from the outside. It's the writer who shows up to write bad first drafts, the entrepreneur who makes sales calls despite rejection, the athlete who trains even when progress feels invisible. It lacks the dramatic arc we associate with success stories because most real work happens in the unremarkable middle.

Just planning, by contrast, always looks more interesting. It has better stories, cleaner narratives, and more engaging social media content. But it's built on the fundamental misunderstanding that success is about appearing successful rather than becoming capable.

The path forward isn't to judge others, but to develop enough self-awareness to recognize when we're confusing the intention of success with the practice. Real progress rarely announces itself. It accumulates quietly in the space between intention and action, where the work gets done whether anyone is watching or not.