There is a list I have been keeping for years.
I never wrote it down, but I know it by heart.
It is the list of things I will do once I am ready.
Speak up in the meeting, once I know more. Share my ideas, once they are better. Apply for the bigger thing, once I have more experience. Take myself seriously, once other people do.
Most of us have a list like this.
We just don't call it a list.
We call it being realistic.
I only noticed how long mine had become when I stood in the middle of Gamescom in Cologne.
Thousands of people. Endless halls. Every conversation moving fast, every person seeming to know exactly where they were going.
And for a moment, I felt the familiar thought rise up:
Everyone here is further ahead than I am.
It is a humbling feeling, being surrounded by people who seem certain.
You become very aware of everything you don't know yet. How many paths exist that you never considered. How much of your own story is still unwritten.
And it is so easy to mistake that feeling for proof that you don't belong.
But somewhere between the second and third day, I started noticing something else.
The person who seemed so sure of himself in one conversation was nervously checking his notes before the next.
The woman who spoke so smoothly admitted over coffee that this was her first time presenting.
People were asking questions they didn't know the answers to. Introducing themselves to strangers. Figuring it out as they went.
That was when it hit me.
Nobody in that room had waited until they felt ready.
They were not confident first and then present.
They were present first, and the confidence was slowly catching up.
We tend to look at people who seem experienced and assume they crossed some invisible line we still have to reach.
As if there is a day you wake up and finally feel qualified.
That day does not come.
Everyone you admire was once the newest person in the room.
They sat through conversations they only half understood. They wondered whether they had been invited by mistake. They went anyway.
That is the only real difference.
I have ambitions of my own.
I want to do meaningful work. I want to keep growing. I want to build a life that actually reflects what matters to me.
But I am starting to see how ambition can quietly turn into a very polished way of postponing my life.
There is always one more skill to learn. One more milestone to reach. One more reason to say later.
And later is comfortable.
Later never asks you to be seen before you feel finished.
But later also has a cost we rarely count.
The conversation that went to someone else. The idea that stayed in your notes. The version of your life that kept waiting in the hallway while you prepared to deserve it.
So I have started asking myself a harder question:
What am I waiting to become before I let myself live the life I want?
I don't want to confuse humility with shrinking.
Knowing what I don't know is valuable.
Listening, asking questions, admitting I am still learning — these are strengths.
But humility was never meant to erase what I already bring.
Someone knowing more than me does not mean I know nothing. Being a beginner in one room does not make me small in every room.
I can be a work in progress and still take my work seriously. I can feel uncertain and still offer something worth hearing.
Both can be true at the same time.
I went to Germany for business.
I came home thinking about every room I have quietly stood outside of, waiting for permission no one was ever going to give me.
There will be more unfamiliar rooms.
I will probably doubt myself in the next one too.
Growth doesn't mean the doubt disappears.
It means the doubt no longer gets the final vote.
So I want to walk in prepared, curious and respectful of the people I meet.
Not to prove I belong.
But because I have something to learn, something to give, and a life I am still building.
And before you close this page, I want to leave you with the question I keep coming back to.
What is on your "once I'm ready" list?
Look at it honestly.
Because somewhere today, someone with less experience than you, and just as many doubts, is walking into the room you are still waiting outside of.
The only thing they have that you don't is the decision to go in.
You don't need to arrive as the person you hope to become.
You only need to show up as the person you are today.
That is how she begins.
Until the next page, — Miss Joo