The Waiting Trap
Why "My Time Will Come" is the lie that keeps you stuck.
Have you ever heard someone say, “his time of success will come”?
Or maybe you have said it yourself, in a moment when life refused to bend the way you wanted.
Picture this. You walk up to a bar, dressed in your best shirt, ready for the night. The guard at the entrance looks you up and down and waves you off. You argue. You raise your voice. You explain. But nothing works. So, you walk away, throwing one last sentence over your shoulder with the most serious face you can manage. “My time will come.”
You return home with a chest full of anger and a head full of embarrassment. Sleep does not visit you that night, because the insult is too heavy to carry. You keep imagining how you will teach that fat, ugly guard a lesson someday.
Then, you think, and you think, and you think some more. While you are busy thinking, time keeps moving. Days turn into weeks. Weeks turn into months. Nothing changes. Every time you cross that same street and see that same guard, your adrenaline shoots up, and you whisper to yourself, “I will teach him a lesson one day.”
Hidden behind that “one day” is the same old sentence. “My time of success will come.”
But sadly, it never arrives.
So the question worth sitting with is this. Why did your time of success not come? Why?
If you already know the answer, that is excellent. And if you do not, that is even cooler, because this entire piece is about why our time of success never comes.
A Scene From India That Says It All
Before we move forward, allow us to share a small scene from our country, India. It is a scene that fits the topic of “my time of success will come” perfectly.
Back in January 2019, the streets of India had a new anthem.
Younger guys, especially, kept repeating a few lines from a song in the movie Gully Boy. And they were not just reciting them for fun. They were saying these lines as if they truly meant them, especially when they needed to declare that they would one day do something great.
The phrase was simple. Apna time aayega. In English, “My time will come.”
If you had an argument with someone, they would throw “Apna time aayega“ at you. If you mocked someone’s dream, they would reply with “Apna time aayega.” People got so attached to those three words that they bought t-shirts, hoodies, and posters of the phrase. It became a uniform of hope.
If you want to read the translated verses of the song, the link is worth your time. We would call it a magnificent piece of art, and we are certain it will move you.
But here is the painful question. Did those people, the ones who chanted “Apna time aayega“ with so much fire, actually get their time?
No. Most of them did not.
Look around today, years later, and you will find that many of them are still the same person they were back then. Same street. Same wandering. Same wishful look in the eye. Big ambition sitting on top of a habit of merely wishing. They dream like Murad Ahmed, the character from Gully Boy, expecting their dreams to walk up to their door.
But they conveniently forget what actually made Murad’s story work.
To know more about the real boys behind that character, you can read the story of the two middle-class kids from Mumbai who turned into household names in the Indian music industry.
Their journey was so emotional and so motivating that an entire movie was built on it.
There is a lesson in that story, and it is not the chant.
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