Business owners and professionals tend to carry an invisible clock around, the one that says you should have the company scaled or reach partnership at your law firm or accounting firm in a few short years. When a venture stumbles or a career turns out to be pointed at the wrong target or moving slower than expected, that clock gets loud. Author Steven Pressfield once passed along something a friend told him. “They always tell you life is short, but actually, life is long. And if we find ourselves making mistakes or we haven’t yet found our real calling, don’t drive yourself crazy with that. There’s plenty of time.” I read that and nodded my head. Hearing that the road is long is permission to stop treating every misstep as a verdict or permanent.

I see the cost of the short-life mindset in my practice all the time. Owners sign a bad lease because they feel they can’t afford to wait for the right space. They hold on to a failing business long past the point of reason because walking away feels like admitting they wasted years they don’t have. But panic is a lousy business advisor. Most of the expensive mistakes that cross my desk were made by smart people who believed they were running out of time, when the real problem was that they hadn’t paused long enough to think through their options and next steps.

What this means is that you have to get out of bed with a sense of urgency about today, because today is the only day you can actually do anything with. The trick is to hold that urgency and a long horizon at the same time. Urgency without a plan is just frantic activity, and a plan without urgency is a document in a drawer. The people I admire most in business seem to have worked out how to be impatient about the next twenty-four hours and patient about the next ten years.

So the question to ask yourself every morning is what can I do today to move the ball forward? It doesn’t need to be dramatic. Maybe it’s the overdue conversation with a key employee, the operating agreement you keep meaning to update, the call to a prospective customer, or an hour of thinking about where you want to be in five years. Small moves, repeated over a long life make a huge difference. If you’ve made some mistakes along the way, welcome to the club. There’s plenty of time, so use today well.