Last year, when I turned 26, I made a simple promise to myself: be consistent.
I didn’t want the occasional spark of motivation or the frantic intensity of a short burst. I wanted to be steady, especially when the work felt ordinary. It started well. I built a rhythm and proved I could show up, but even with that rhythm, I hit walls. A 150 km ride was my ceiling. I had set a goal of 200 km in August, but looking at the data, I had to be honest about where I stood. I felt the sting of falling short, which is that familiar disappointment of wanting a version of yourself that hasn’t arrived yet.
That feeling lingered until I reframed it with two small words: not yet.
It felt trivial at first, but it shifted my perspective. Instead of seeing the gap as a failure, I began to see it as a work in progress. I stopped chasing the outcome and started trusting the quiet background noise of consistency.
Over time, “not yet” stopped feeling like a limitation and started feeling like a phase. We often treat readiness as a fixed state, something we either possess or lack, when in reality it is something we inhabit gradually. The work doesn’t always announce itself. It accumulates in the margins and reshapes our “normal” until the things that once felt impossible are suddenly within arm’s reach.
This past week, I saw the evidence. I rode 160 Kilometers (an imperial century!) last weekend, and this weekend, I cleared 213 kilometers. Somewhere in between, I pulled myself up for my first bodyweight pull-up.
The strange part? It didn’t feel dramatic. There was no cinematic moment where everything clicked and no sudden surge of power. It just felt… normal. That might be the clearest sign of growth: when a milestone no longer feels like a peak, but like the ground you’re standing on.
The milestones matter less than the way they were built. Most of those days didn’t feel like progress; they felt like repetitions. You show up, you do the work, and you move on. But that is the part that compounds. It shifts your baseline invisibly until your “not yet” looks exactly like “now.”
I’ve been using the phrase “not yet” in a lot of my conversations lately, but the inspiration for this title came from a recent talk with someone close to me. We were just talking about my goals when the phrase came up naturally: not yet… until it is. It was a casual moment, but it stayed with me because it put words to a feeling I hadn’t fully framed myself. It captured the idea that the distance between where you are and where you want to be isn’t a fixed void. It is just a space that needs time and consistency to close.
I’m writing this as a reminder to myself. To keep going when the work feels unremarkable. To trust the process when it feels like nothing is happening. I’ve seen now how quietly the world can change.
Not yet… until it is.