Stay ready, so you don’t have to get ready.

One of my favorite parts of the experiential community and the work we engage in is the ancillary threads – the things that happen because of what we’ve built, but not necessarily scripted in the initial programming. These threads often take on different shapes and materialize in various ways, yet they all seem to happen organically.

When you stumble upon one, you generally raise an eyebrow in surprise, smile, and say something to yourself like, “Well that’s cool.”

Sometimes they are unexpected friendships or yearly traditions on long-running projects, but other times they form externally, like communities around our events or unexpected use cases of deployments.

There’s a beauty to them.

We were hosting a small master class at an immersive music space we built with the Boys & Girls Club. I told the group there might be some attention on what they were creating – maybe even press.

A girl in the front row didn’t flinch.

“I’m ready.”

Why so sure?

“My grandma said, you gotta stay ready, so you don’t have to get ready.”

Well, isn’t there truth to that? 

What a gem of a comment. I thought about it for a while.

“Ready” isn’t frantic. It’s not living on high alert. It’s doing enough of the boring work early that opportunity feels like timing, not luck. Clean files. Current reel. A first move everyone knows without a meeting.

For me, that kind of mindset looks like this:

We put in the work.
We win or we learn.
We modify.
We put systems in place and document what good looks like.
We train others up so the next rep is smoother.
We get better by lifting one another up.
We become, ready.

The best opportunities rarely knock politely. They show up half-formed and at the wrong time. If you’re still getting ready, you miss them. If you stay ready, you can say yes with a clear head and figure the rest out on the move.

Building the plane while flying – so to speak.

My favorite part of these ancillary threads is you never know what you’ll learn, or when that thread will weave back into a bigger story. Some of my favorite memories are the byproduct of something else entirely, made possible because we were ready and willing to jump into a lane that wasn’t on the day’s script.

Get ready. Stay ready. So when the moment shows up, you’re already in motion.

What’s one thing you keep ready so you can say yes faster?

🔗 Let’s connect! linkedin.com/in/scottschoeneberger.