Welcome to the Cabin. I’m Shawn James, the host of the My Self Reliance podcast and YouTube channel.
This is the story of how I am withdrawing from modern society to pursue a free, natural, healthy, meaningful and satisfying life and how you can too. Join me as I build an off grid homestead in the wilderness complete with log cabins, an outdoor kitchen, a wood-fired sauna, lumber mill, vegetable garden, fruit orchard, food forest and haven for wildlife.
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The “right time” never shows up, and waiting for it can be one of the most expensive habits we carry. From the cabin, I talk through how procrastination and paralysis by analysis disguise themselves as responsibility, and why “being careful” can quietly become a decision to stay stuck. If you’ve been telling yourself you’ll start when you have more money, more time, more confidence, better weather, older kids, or a calmer world, this is your reminder that life does not arrive pre-cleared of obstacles.
I share the hard-earned lesson that pushed me to move: losing the option to wait. When my business failed and I had to start over, ideal conditions stopped being a requirement and action became the only path forward. That shift changed everything about how I build self-reliance, from cabin building to gardening to learning new skills. Competence doesn’t come from reading, planning, or watching someone else do it; it comes from doing the work while you’re still inexperienced, paying attention, and improving in motion.
We also dig into the trap of “productive” preparation: endless research, checklists, and gear collecting that feels like progress but replaces the real thing. The practical solution is smaller than you think. One step today, then the next one, then the next, using simple actions you can track, like the approach behind 52 Weeks to Self-Reliance. If this hits home, subscribe, share this with a friend who’s waiting, and leave a review. What’s one small step you’ll take today?
The right time never came. I waited for it for years and it just never showed up. And eventually I understood that it was never going to because there's no such thing. It's only now and whatever you're willing to do with it, ready or not. Welcome
to the cabin, everybody, where we unplug, unwind, and reconnect. I'm Sean James, and this is my self-reliance. Waiting for the right time is one of the most expensive habits a person can carry, and I carried it badly for a long stretch of my life. So with this episode, I want to talk about why we wait, what it quietly costs us, and how I finally learned to start before I felt ready, which as far as I can tell is the only way anything really ever actually gets started. I think procrastination is a trap that a lot of us fall into. And some people are just prone to it and fall into that trap more often than others. Paralysis of analysis is what I like to call it. And it's I think very true that people tend to just keep justifying why they're going to wait. And uh that time just never comes. The opposite of that, of course, is something that I'm maybe more guilty of, is that's to be too spontaneous, jump into things without thinking about it. Anyway, that's what I'm gonna talk about today.
You know, waiting sometimes just feels responsible, and that's exactly what makes it so dangerous, I think. And you're waiting for the right time. You can tell yourself that you're being careful, you're being smart, you're doing doing your due diligence, and all the while you're simply not doing the thing that you want to do or should do. Waiting looks like patience from the outside, from the inside, though, most of the time, it's fear, just wearing patience as a costume of sorts, a mask. That mask that most of us tend to wear, different masks. I waited for more money before before I would start. I've done that for with businesses and housing. I had to be convinced by my wife to upgrade our first house, for example. I waited to know more before I would begin. This book that I wrote recently might be a good example of that. Still feel like um I don't really know enough to tell other people or to try to educate other people or share my experience with other people. I waited to feel more confident for that reason. I waited for the season to be right, for the weather to be right, waited until the kids were a little bit older. I waited for things to settle down, I waited for the economy to get better, waited for the right political party to be in power.
Here's what I actually learned in the end, though. Things do don't ever settle down, they never really get to where you think they should have been before you start something. There's no version of your life that arrives pre-cleared of obstacles with a clean runaway and perfect conditions, quietly waiting for you to finally feel ready to walk into it. For years I dreamed about the kind of life I'm living now while doing pretty much nothing to move towards it. I thought, well, my wife was not interested, wouldn't be willing to change, or that it was be too disruptive for my kids. So I told myself after doing it when I was younger, I told myself that again I would do it again someday. I'd build another cabin someday. I'd live back on the land on bigger property someday, I would simplify someday. But I learned that someday is just not a day of the week. It's a place many people, including myself, put their dreams to keep them safe and unlived. And I know I kept mine in that position for a long time. It took hitting really hitting rock bottom to finally knock me out of it. Ironically, that it took that because you that was the thing I probably feared the most. The thing that the place that I ended up was because I didn't make the move that I should have made years ago. So when my business failed and I was starting over from close to nothing, maybe worse than nothing, lower than nothing. I didn't have the luxury of waiting for ideal conditions anymore. I just had to act, ready or not, with what I had, which at the time wasn't much. And that, as strange as it sounds, turned out to be a gift, which well, you probably know that if you've been following along. Losing the option to wait was the thing that finally forced me to begin. And I can be grateful now, but maybe didn't seem like it at the time.
So I started before I was ready, really, because ready just was never gonna come. Didn't know how to build a proper cabin when I started building this one. Like I had my cabin from years ago, but if you've seen the pictures of that from way back then, made a lot of amateur mistakes, didn't matter at the time, but I definitely didn't know how to build one the way I built my latest. So I learned um learned by building even the first one, or the one from 2017. I it's definitely things I would have well I did improve. So I didn't, and I still I'm still making mistakes that cost me time and materials, and more than a little bit of pride. Every skill I have now, I learned like in motion, actually practicing practicing it live while already doing the thing, not in some tidy preparatory phase beforehand where I got good in private and then stepped out to perform my competence in public. I actually filmed every step of that path. Maybe I edited to make me look a little more competent, if anything. But I definitely exposed um some of my weaknesses on camera over the years. But that's how skill actually works. You can't read your way to competence, you can't watch a YouTube video and gain competence. You can't wait your way to it either. You get there by st starting out clumsy and inexperienced, and then you just have to stay with it until you get a little bit better. The first wall, obviously that I framed, was not square. Some of them some of them still aren't. First garden I planted mostly failed, and every time I try something new, often those continue to fail. First uh winter out here was pretty tough. You know, understanding how much wood you actually need, especially when you're cooking as well, whether it's hot out or cold out. That was difficult being impeded by the snow depth, not getting around very easily was in education. There was no way to get any of it, any of that experience without starting before I knew what I was doing and paying attention and uh just learning from my mistakes.
There's a kind of what we call preparation that's really just hiding or procrastinating. You research and then you plan and you gather gear and you watch other people do the thing, and it all feels pretty productive. You know, as you're doing that thing, you're sitting at your computer doing out a checklist or whatever. It feels like you're doing something, but none of it's the actual thing. So you actually maybe haven't even grown anything. And then at some point, that preparation quietly becomes the thing you do instead of starting. A good example is gear junkies. People collect a lot of gear. I'm definitely I've been guilty of this over the years, all the way back to my teenage years, collecting fishing lures, for example, and reading all the magazines. I definitely did way more of that than I actually did of the real thing. More so more of the prep, more organizing my tackle box, more reading articles, more assembling and buying equipment than actually doing the thing. It's a trap I think a lot of us get into. You can actually, like I said, you feel like you're doing something every time you do one of those activities that are not the real thing, and you think you're doing the real thing. And obviously, I'm not against learning. You have to try to gather resources and learn as much as you possibly can. And I learn constantly every single day, every single day that I'm doing something, or every single day that I'm research day that I'm researching. But I learn now while actually doing more often, and it's completely different from the learning in order to someday do something in the in the future. That's if you know what I mean. Learning that sticks is the learning that meets a real problem sitting in front of you. Everything else tends to evaporate because somewhere underneath your mind knows it's not actually going to be tested, so you learn these things. School is a good example. You learn how to do mathematics, you even can get quite good at it, and then you get out into the real world away from the school setting, and you forget everything you learn there because you don't actually put it into practice. But the things you do put into practice, for my case, the math that I actually use, all the measurements and the calculating of materials and so on, I actually have retained. I'm actually good at those things because I practice, I put them into practice. I don't learn just read and learn about them.
The weight out of that weighting is not like a grand leap. It's just a step. You take small steps, one every day if you can, more obviously, if you can. Don't have to sell everything and move to the woods, for example, this week. Maybe that's your path eventually, and it was mine. But it's not the first step, and treating it as the first step is exactly what keeps you frozen because that leap looks too big to take, and most people don't take any step. That's um extremely common. Again, I I'm guilty of all of this. I'm not criticizing anybody for anybody for it. This I think there's utility in that. If you don't take risks, you tend to not maybe get injured or to lose things as much. But you tend also not to get ahead. So it's got that's what the utility is, I think, of being cautious of overanalyzing things before you you take a step. So take one step. You can actually take it um today, take it one of those small steps, get like the course, for example. Actually, that 52 weeks to self-reliance. Um, I don't know if you've seen that book that I wrote wrote, but it's a fairly short book, and now I've created a whole bunch of checklists to go along with it or action plan to go along with it. But to me, that breaks it down so simply into those small steps because that first step is so hard and that taking each step, but when there are small little bites like that, it's amazing how much they add up to something over a course of a year or longer. So if you go back through that book, you'll see that I'm just talking about those small steps, uh saying like grow one thing instead of trying to grow a whole garden, fix one thing yours yourself instead of calling someone or uh replacing it, buying something new and throwing that one out. Talk about learning one skill, just one, like not trying to learn a whole all of the off-grid living skills or the survival skills, just learn one at a time, one a week or one a month. Spend one hour moving toward life instead of only dreaming about it, instead of thinking you have to spend a whole day or a week that you don't have towards it. Once you take that one step today, maybe it's one step in each of these things. So maybe you're taking a step to learn how to grow each day or each week, and then you're also learning another skill. You're learning how to repair something in your house each week or each day. Just keep taking those little steps. And if you follow that um, those checklists of that course that I'm talking about or the book, then uh you're gonna track all of those things and you'll see that you're actually making progress because maybe that's one of the limitations people have from imposing themselves. They take these little steps and they don't see a massive accumulation of or a massive uh leap forward, that grand leap forward. So they maybe get frustrated and give up. But when you're documenting that and you're seeing that you're improving in all these ways, then it's uh becomes more real. So
that's what I still do to this day. There's not a day that goes by that I don't, first of all, I've put this pressure on myself that I feel guilty if I haven't taken a step towards my dream life or to secure this dream life that I'm living now. And I get anxious about it, so I try to make sure I've done that. It reduces my cortisol, which I've talked about in another video, reduces that underlying anxiety or stress if I feel like I'm making progress. So that's my secret. Just take one step at a time and it'll stack up over the ears and before you know it, you're well on your way or you're there. And then you'll find a new place to be. You'll keep taking keeps taking steps in that direction. So the right time is just a story we tell ourselves to make that uh waiting feel like it's wise, like it's smart. But there is no right time. So there's only this time, the one you're standing in right now. It's imperfect and unready, and it's completely sufficient for that one small step. So take it, then take the next one and the next one and keep going. I've got a lot of steps I need to take today. Got this uh beautiful weather out there, and just enough rain to make the weeds grow like mad in my garden, so I've got to take care of those. So I'm gonna have a busy, busy day today. But I know it's another step towards my self-reliance, and I I I look forward to taking it. If you're interested in more of this content, if this is new to you, uh this channel or this podcast, then uh encourage you to just check out my self-reliance. Probably the easiest the easiest way to find the rest of my stuff in my community, our community, there, myself reliance.com. You can start there and you can find links to all the other content. Anyway, that's it. I'm going back to work. So thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. I'll see you at the Kevin next time. Take care.
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