My Dad is a planner. He is intensely practical, analytical and devoted to engineering his future. He has planned his life out, meticulously, decades and decades in advance, and has worked just that plan, for the most part. He’s that guy that runs the numbers, mostly in his mathematical genius of a head and on paper; if he were 20 years younger, he’d be your friend that obsesses over Excel spreadsheets. He plans his mother’s birthday parties with the same level of precision and forethought as he plans his fitness program, his vacations, monthly budgets and his long-term finances.

I would not say, though, that he’s one of those ‘analysis paralysis types.’ Starting at age 17, he worked the same job for nearly 30 years, got a college degree during his last few years on the job, retired and went back to work to get a second pension: check, check, check and check. He grew up next door to my mother, and they planned to get married after high school, start working, buy a house, have a kid seven years in, wait five years, have another kid, and send them both to private school – and that’s exactly what they did.

But on the list of words I would never think to use in describing my Dad, I’d put spontaneous, bon-vivant, pleasure-seeking and whimsical at the top. He’s just a responsible guy who I frankly, underappreciated for years, seeing him as overly strict, rigid and disciplined, until I matured enough to learn how many of my friends and colleagues craved precisely such reliability and structure in their fathers.

I’m old enough now to have gone through that inevitable cycle children go through, where your thoughts that you’re so much smarter than your parents transform into begrudging acquiescence that perhaps your parents might know a thing or two, which evolves into the deepest respect and, eventually, appreciation.

So, it’s not at all unusual when I’m considering my own future plans and big decisions for me to ring up my dear old Dad and walk through things with him – sussing out all the pros, cons, pitfalls and prep steps. (And, as I’ve gotten older and more experienced in business and in life, I’ve been honored to get more than a few of those talk-it-out-and-run-the-numbers calls from him, too!)

I recently made such a call to my Dad, and told him of a very major business move I was considering. The decision at hand posed the potential for both high reward and high risk, albeit a calculated risk I was well-poised to aggressively manage. The potential rewards, on the other hand, would be vast in both financial returns and plain old personal fulfillment – the latter of which is not a line item I’ve heard my Dad ever work into his own decision-making calculus.

So, I described the venture I was considering, explained why I was inclined to move forward, and then qualified that, saying, “But, I really don’t want to be hasty.”

And my gruff, mathy, deliberate, planning-obsessed 61-years-young Marine of a Dad cut me off, barking out the (rhetorical) question:

“How old are you?!”

I reminded him.

His next statement put me in a state in which I rarely find myself: the state of speechlessness. He said:

“You know what? You should be hasty!”

He elaborated:

“No one tells you guys this, but once you hit 30, it seems like you go to sleep one night, wake up, and you’re 50. Then it’s like you take a nap, wake up and you’re 60. So, if there’s something you feel like you need to do in this world or want to do in your life. DO IT. Be hasty. Of course, I want you to be smart – run the numbers, make the calls, read the contracts. And I know you’ll do all of that. Then be hasty – if you want to do it, do it, and do it now.”

As is so often the case, my Dad is right. Life is urgent. Possibility beckons. And so does life, your dream career, your idea, that business model or plan you’ve been cooking up, the marketplace. I believe that there are seasons for everything in life and in business: seasons to learn, to analyze, to cultivate and to harvest.

But when those seasons have passed, those who will realize the dreams, opportunities and visions that once existed only in the remotest corners of possibility are those who realize that there is no someday time slot, out there in the future, that is cosmically set aside for you to click out of playing small and switch over to the big game.

One of my favorite statements of this very principle comes from the credo you’ve undoubtedly seen emblazoned on bags toted around by yoga girls and runners all over town, the lululemon manifesto:

The world is changing at such a rapid rate that waiting to implement changes will leave you 2 steps behind. DO IT NOW, DO IT NOW, DO IT NOW!