Later is a long way off

A man in Doha has been planning to learn French for most of a decade. He means it. He owns a textbook, and he has started three times. The plan is always the same: once work calms down, once the move is done, once the children are older.

That word "once" is doing a great deal of work. A goal placed far enough ahead stops being a goal and becomes a polite way of saying not yet, and not yet has a habit of turning into not at all.

It is not weakness. Almost everything pressing on him is short term. This month's deadline, this week's errands, tonight's homework at the kitchen table. Each one is real and each one is due now. The French is due at no particular time, so it loses every contest. And he may well be working somewhere else, perhaps living somewhere else, ten years from now, which makes it hard to feel that ten years from now is his problem.

Small businesses run on the same arithmetic, because a business is only a group of people with the same habits. A shop says it will one day build a real relationship with its own customers instead of paying for their attention month after month. It says it will one day train someone who could run things without the founder. Meanwhile every working hour goes to this month's numbers, and one day stays exactly as far off as it always was.

The few who do differently have not found extra time. They have moved the line between now and later. For them, the work that pays off in five years belongs to this week, with an hour of its own, rather than to a calmer future that never turns up.

That move costs almost nothing, and hardly anyone makes it, which is precisely why it is worth so much.