Back in primary and high school my mates and I had a tendency of being super excited on matchday.
If I’m honest, much of the excitement had very little to do with the game.
We were mostly excited by the prospect of seeing beautiful girls we weren’t familiar with from the visiting school.
We’d have the opportunity to practise a dying art – ukutoucha (making your move) – putting our rizz into practice and asking the beautiful ladies out.
Exciting and daunting at the same time. Because you could get rejected.
I’m lying… we got rejected more times than we got any positive responses.
But who cares? You didn’t stop. You moved on to the next girl.
The scariest part was that you’d hardly find the girl you were eyeing alone. You’d have to fix your posture, approach her in front of her friends and risk not only being rejected but laughed at to your face.
Your boys would be cheering you on from a distance. And if you walked back with a number – a Colgate smile on your face, chest out – we’d cheer like you were some anointed Greek god.
Getting a cell number was the hardest thing in the world. Or maybe girls from that era were just stubborn as mules. I genuinely don’t know.
What if you refused to go?
That was up to you. Nobody forced you. But if you saw a girl you liked and still didn’t approach her, you were just delaying the excruciating regret of never knowing. And there was no undoing it… the odds of ever seeing that girl again were zero.
So you took a stab. If you got rejected, at least you had your answer. If you didn’t, kudos… you’d secured yourself a chipi – a beautiful girl.
This is what I call a window opportunity.
It was now or never.
It was different from, say, asking out a girl at your own school – a door opportunity. She’d be there tomorrow. And the day after. So, there was no urgency required.
I believe most moments in life are either windows or doors. And we consistently make the mistake of treating windows like doors.
Most goals are windows, not doors.
If you want to go darker… we’re not here forever, and yet we somehow think we have all the time in the world. Maybe next week. Maybe next year.
About a decade ago I sat down to write a book for the first time. My PC crashed and I had no backup and lost everything.
I told myself: “God wouldn’t let my PC crash knowing I have no backup if he really wanted me to write this book.”
So I shelved it. Don’t ask me when I planned to return to it… I couldn’t tell you.
I was treating the book as a door when it was a window.
Writing a book requires extended periods of sitting still, risking back pain and feeling genuine emotional strain while trying to articulate your thoughts.
I did that for two years.
And I knew – with a young family one day, with all the responsibilities that come with that – this window would close.
My goal was always to write the book before that happened.
The longer I delayed, the more likely it was never going to happen. I had to ask myself honestly: would I be comfortable never fulfilling this childhood dream?
I also had fear about what people would think. Who does he think he is, publishing a book?
But then I had to ask: do people’s opinions matter more than my childhood dream?
They didn’t.
My book is out and doing well.
The truth is you will never know if anything is going to work out until you try it.
The only way to know is to start.
There will always be fog when you’re doing something without a blueprint. But that fog puts you in the same position as everyone else who ever started something without guidance. You can only ever see a few steps ahead. Your job is simply to take the one that’s in front of you.
What if you have the goal but can’t shake the laziness?
The late cartoonist Scott Adams – creator of the Dilbert comic strip – had a reframe that changed how I think about this.
He says: “What if laziness is just a habit of thinking about the cost of things – the effort – instead of thinking about the payoff?”
He argues that you can reverse laziness by simply redirecting your attention.
In other words, thinking about the delicious food instead of the effort of cooking it.
Think about how you’ll feel after, not what it costs to get there.
It’s the same reframe I used to lift weights this morning despite it being a public holiday and every part of me wanting to stay horizontal. Part of me knew the payoff – feeling refreshed, having shown up – would outweigh the cost of getting started. No pun intended.
It’s the same reframe that kept me sitting down for two years writing a book without knowing if anyone would ever read it. Because the payoff of having capitalised on that window, of having done the thing I set out to do, overrode every difficulty of getting there.
Most things worth doing are windows. They won’t wait forever.
The question isn’t whether you have the time. You probably do, right now.
The question is whether you’ll treat this like a door – something that will always be there – or a window. Because unlike the girls from the visiting school, some opportunities do come around again.
But most don’t.
And you won’t know which kind you’re dealing with until it’s already closed.
© Phumzile