Too Early Beats Too Late
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Nat Eliason's sequencing rule for major life decisions, built on the observation that different life goals have radically different windows. A career can be pursued into your sixties and seventies if you are healthy, so delaying it by a decade costs relatively little. Finding a partner and having children runs on a much shorter fuse — roughly eighteen years from graduation to cover dating, choosing, marrying and then several years of having kids. Because both defer with equal ease, people treat the trade as symmetric when it is not. The rule is to sequence the narrow-window goals first, moderate rather than maximise the career grind while doing so, and take entrepreneurial risk while cost of living and obligations are lowest. Err too early and improvise, rather than discovering there is no later.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Ask how wide the window actually is
For each big goal, establish whether it can genuinely be pursued later. Writing a book can wait — people publish in their sixties and seventies. Some things cannot.
- 2
Separate wide-window from narrow-window goals
Career advancement is wide: delaying it a decade is unlikely to be fatal. Partnership and children are narrow, with an effective ceiling around the late thirties and rising difficulty after forty.
Pro tip Note the genuine exceptions — some paths, like medical school, really do demand an early start.
Watch out Treating the two categories as equally deferrable is the core error.
- 3
Count backwards from the real deadline
From graduation at 22 or 23 you have roughly eighteen years to date enough people to know what you want, find someone, marry, be together a while, then have children — and three or four kids alone takes four to ten years depending on spacing.
Pro tip Do the arithmetic once, explicitly, rather than assuming there is slack.
Watch out Spending your twenties and early thirties on career alone consumes most of the window before the sequence has started.
- 4
Choose the intensity dial, not the on/off switch
You control how hard you grind. Twelve-hour days maximise advancement; eight-to-nine-hour days still build a career while leaving time to find a partner and set up that side of life.
- 5
Front-load entrepreneurial risk
Start the channel, lifestyle business or company in your early twenties when cost of living is near zero and obligations are few. After five or ten years of consulting or tech salary you will not want to live on 50k, and the energy is different.
Watch out Deferring the startup until after a lucrative job makes it structurally harder, not easier.
- 6
Bias toward too early and accept the improvisation
Where the call is close, act early and figure the consequences out. The failure mode of too early is having to solve problems; the failure mode of too late is discovering the option has closed.
Pro tip Nat reports the career itself got easier after committing — shared responsibilities and a stronger sense of purpose.
In the wild
Nat had his first child at 28, with his wife at 25. He works the timeline forward: their daughter graduates college when his wife is 46 and he is 48 or 49, young enough to travel to see her constantly. If she has children at the same age they did, they will be grandparents in their early fifties and still able to run around with them. He and his wife deliberately traded a few more years of being a young, unattached couple for that future — and then found they had not actually given up much of the present life at all.
→ Children early, grandparent years projected in their early fifties, and the social life they thought they were sacrificing largely intact.
Nat's counter-case: someone with entrepreneurial inclinations decides to work at a consulting firm for five or ten years and then attempt the startup. Two things go wrong. Their lifestyle has adjusted to consulting or banking money, so living on 50k a year is no longer acceptable. And the low-cost, low-obligation, high-energy conditions that make an early-twenties attempt viable are gone. The venture that would have been straightforward at 23 becomes materially harder at 33, with the intervening decade producing no progress toward it.
→ The deferred attempt is harder and more expensive than the one that was skipped, with no offsetting gain.
Common mistakes
Assuming both deferrals cost the same
A decade of delayed career advancement is usually recoverable; a decade of delayed partnership and children can remove the option entirely. Treating them symmetrically silently spends the scarcer resource.
Taking 'grind through your twenties' as the default
The choice is presented as career-or-nothing when the real variable is intensity — eight-to-nine-hour days still build a career while leaving room for the narrow-window goals.
From the transcript
“you can do almost any kind of work into your 60s and 70s if you're healthy and active”
“if you delay finding a partner having kids by 10 years you might miss most of that opportunity entirely”
“it's way better to do a lot of the big things in life too early and risk having to like figure something out than it…”
From the episode
Chasing Success vs True Fulfilment - Nat Eliason
Nat Eliason