There is no perfect moment. There is no point at which you'll finally know enough. The cost of waiting is higher than most people realise — and we learned that the hard way.
📌 Part of the Mindset Series. Catch up on The Time-for-Money Trap and What It Really Means to Make Money While You Sleep before reading this one.
The waiting trap
Here's something we're a little embarrassed to admit.
We had the idea for The Money Tree Project — or something very close to it — years before we actually started it. The core question was there. The frustration with trading time for money was there. The belief that there had to be a better way was there.
What wasn't there was how to start.
Because every time we got close to actually doing something, a new reason appeared to delay starting a passive income stream. We needed more research. We were too busy. Work was too demanding. We didn’t know where to start. Maybe next week I’ll do it.
Sound familiar?
The cost of waiting that nobody talks about
Most people think of waiting as neutral. Like if you haven't started yet, you haven't lost anything. You're just... not ahead.
But that's not quite right. Waiting has a real cost — and it's compounding in the wrong direction the whole time.
"Every month you wait is a month of growth you never get back. Compounding doesn’t wait — and time doesn’t refill."
Think about it in tree terms. A tree planted five years ago is five years further along than one planted today. It has deeper roots, more established branches, and a stronger trunk. The person who started five years before you — even if it wasn’t perfect — is five years ahead of where you'll be when you start.
That's not meant to be discouraging. It's meant to make the case that starting today, even if you aren’t completely clear on where you're going, is more important than starting perfectly in six months. Because nothing is time is perfect, and a journey is never without challenges.
What we were actually waiting for
When we finally got honest about why we kept waiting, the answer wasn't flattering.
We weren't waiting because we needed more information. We had plenty of information. We were waiting because starting meant the possibility of failing. And failing at something, that's uncomfortable.
Waiting felt safe. It looked like preparation, but underneath it was fear. Once you commit to something new and make it public, it feels like everyone is watching and waiting for you to fail. But I realised that wasn’t reality. Not because no one read my blog posts for the first month or two, but because people don’t sit around judging your work — they simply move on. The ones who connect with what you’re creating are the ones who stay. They’re your real audience. So stay true to your vision and let them find you.
"The perfect plan is just the waiting trap dressed up nicely. Eventually, research stops being preparation and starts being avoidance. "
We didn't need a perfect plan. We needed a first step that would get the ball rolling.
What finally got us moving
Two things shifted for us.
The first was finding what we were actually afraid of. Not a vague fear of things going wrong — but the actual thing that made us uncomfortable. It is something that holds most people back, but when we named it, honestly, it turned out to be manageable. It was the “F” word - FAILURE. We weren't risking our savings. We weren't quitting our jobs. We were running a small experiment in our spare time. The downside was limited. The upside was everything. The only thing holding us back was the judgement in our own heads.
Once we had identified it the second thing was reframing what failure actually meant. We'd been thinking about it as a verdict — you tried, you failed, you were wrong to try. But the more we looked at people who had actually built things, the more we saw that failure was just data.
"Mistakes are lessons in disguise. Failure only becomes valuable when you learn from it."
The experiment didn't work the way we expected. Here's what we learned. Here's what we can do differently next time
That's not failure. That's commitment to the vision and how building the best things actually works.
The practical case for imperfect action
Here's what starting imperfectly actually looks like in practice:
- You pick the experiment that seems most interesting, not the objectively perfect one — because the perfect one doesn't exist yet.
- You give yourself a limited time frame and a realistic budget — so there's a natural review point rather than an open-ended commitment.
- You document everything from day one — what you tried, how long it took, what it cost, what happened. This is how experiments become content.
- You review honestly at the end — not 'did this make me rich?' but 'what did I learn and is it worth continuing?'
That's it. That's the whole framework. It's not complicated. The hard part is starting — and then actually doing that review rather than quietly letting the experiment fade out when it gets uncomfortable and doesn’t seem to be getting any results. One of the keys to your success will be honest reflection and being vulnerable.
Where we are now
We're not going to pretend we have it all figured out now. We absolutely don't. The Money Tree Project is a work in progress. Some experiments will work. Some won't. We're learning as we go, which is exactly what we said we'd do.
But here's what we know: we are further along now than we would have been if we'd kept waiting. And we will be even more progressed, refined and experienced in 2 years time. Every post we publish, every experiment we run, every subscriber who joins our community — that's compounding. That's the tree growing.
And none of it would be happening if we'd waited until we were ready.
"You don't need to have it all figured out to start. You just need to be willing to figure it out as you go. Because a journey isn’t a straight line."
If you're sitting on an idea right now — a business concept, an income experiment, a project you've been meaning to start — this is the post we'd want you to read before you put it off for another month.
Start small. Start messy. Start now.
Planting a tree doesn’t take much preparation, but it grows stronger when you commit to nurturing it — small, steady improvements that compound over time.
CONTINUE READING — MINDSET SERIES
← Previous in this series: What It Really Means to Make Money While You Sleep — the honest version without the hype
→ Next in this series: Small Steps, Big Picture: How We Think About Progress — coming soon
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
If this post resonated, here are a few others worth reading:
🌱 [Origin Story] Why We Started The Money Tree Project — the kitchen table question that started everything
⏰ [Mindset Series] The Time-for-Money Trap — why most of us are in it without realising
💡 [Origin Story] What Financial Freedom Actually Means to Us — spoiler — it's not a yacht
🧪 [Coming soon — Experiments] How We Decide Which Income Streams to Try — our experiment selection framework
Every tree starts with a single seed. This is ours — and we'd love for you to plant one too.
Subscribe to our newsletter so you don't miss the next post in the Mindset Series — or any of the experiment updates coming later this year.
ABOUT MR & MRS MONEYTREE
We're a husband-and-wife team from Australia with a young family and a simple goal: to build a life with more flexibility, freedom, and choice baked into it. The Money Tree Project is how we document that journey — openly, honestly, and without the fluff.