Put the cart before the horse
The size of life is equivalent to our yeses.
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There’s an old saying we’ve all been told: don’t put the cart before the horse.
Don’t get ahead of yourself. Don’t commit before you’re ready. Don’t say yes until you have a plan. We’ve been taught over and over to have it all figured out and then act.
But what if we flip it?
This article was my husband’s idea.
We were sitting in our kitchen one morning and he said: “I have an idea for your next article.” I was intrigued and even more than intrigued.. I was flattered.
There’s something so surreal about having a life partner that’s in your corner like this. Someone who sees you more clearly than you even see yourself. Where they get a front row seat to your life. You’re so busy in production mode: doing, being, living. That it’s hard to see from the inside out sometimes. But from where he’s sitting? He’s got a front row seat with popcorn in hand watching it all unfold. So when he has an idea that I can’t see, I get really excited to hear his vantage point.
He said: “Put the cart before the horse.”
I knew right away what he meant.
The birth story theory
We have this joke about our birth stories and how we believe, somehow someway, they define how we move through the world as adults.
For example: I tried to make my debut at 26 weeks. Ready for life to start regardless of timeline or the rules of waiting. That is very much how I live my life today: full steam ahead in every way. A hint of a vacation bug? Booking the flights. A brief idea of a potential move? Zillow app opened. New business idea? Create the LLC. My entire operating system is: decide on the end goal and trust that I’ll figure out how to get there.
My husband, on the other hand, was a full 40-week, full-term baby. Cozy in his environment with no plans of going anywhere until he was quite literally forced out by induction. So you can imagine how we balance each other out in vacation planning or knee-jerk life events.
He knows my patterns better than I know them myself. He watches me bet on endings before I know the full story. He sees me say yes and then build along the way. So when he suggested the topic, he not just giving me writing advice, he’s coming alongside of who I am.
What he was really saying
When he said “put the cart before the horse” he was referring to my entire life.
He was asking me to share the stories that have been building blocks and the moments where I’ve bet on the destination before I knew the full story. Where I’ve said yes and then built along the way. Because yes, these stories can inspire others. But they’ve shaped who I am. They’ve been some of the key decisions that have gotten me to where I am.
Put the cart before the horse is more than storylines. It’s a mindset. A belief that you will figure it out regardless of the roadblocks, the circumstances, the unknown obstacles. It’s a mindset of knowing what you want as the end goal so clearly that you’re willing to step into the unknown to go get it.
That’s it.
Not willpower, strategy, or even courage.. honestly. Just clarity and excitement about the destination paired with the faith that you’re capable of navigating whatever comes.
So let’s go back
The year was 2010. The era of ruffled peplum tops, ultra skinny pastel colored jeans, and the now dreaded lark filter. I was just out of college, life was good, the world was my oyster, and I had my eyes set on moving to the big city: Minneapolis. Because….well… that’s where all my girlfriends were.
I was so set on it that I said yes before I had any of it figured out. No full-time job lined up. No real plan. Just the end goal: to live where my friends lived.
And like most post-college kids I barely had a dollar to my name. So I convinced my folks to cosign on a lease with me for a two-bedroom apartment just outside the city. I didn’t have a roommate yet so my parents said they’d give me a little runway. Two months of the second bedroom rent while I found one. But once those two months were up…I was on my own. I signed the lease on the spot.
Cart before the horse.
At the time I was so annoyed with them for putting a deadline on me like that. But looking back it was the best thing they could have done for me. They put me in a position where I had to figure it out.
This was my goal…. to live here… in this city.. in this apartment. And in order to do it, I needed a roommate.
So I did the next thing the deadline required. I posted on Craigslist (crazy. I know.. But keep in mind it was 2010). So I’d meet these “applicants” at a local coffee shop and I quite literally conducted interviews with total strangers for a roommate before my folks cut me off.
I found the roommate on time: Ashley. A strawberry blonde blue-eyed girl from a small town in Minnesota. She worked out fine outside of an unforeseen quirk of writing her initials on every single eggshell in the carton even though I never ate one of her eggs.
Then life did as life does. I eventually got the right job. And that job gave me the greatest gift of all: my husband. Then a promotion, a relocation to San Francisco, and an entirely new chapter neither of us saw coming that changed our lives for the better.
All of it traces back to one yes I said before I had any business saying it.
And here’s the part I still can’t quite believe: once I committed, my brain had no choice but to figure out the how. The yes came first. The roadmap came after. And the roadmap I built under pressure was clearer than anything I could have planned from the security of not having decided yet.
I signed that lease before I had a roommate and it became the bedrock for every big decision I’ve made since.
Now back to 2025
Then there was the retreat. Less than a year ago, my co-founder, Parnian Emami + our incredible team members Laura Santi and Anna Cogswell, booked the property for our very first BONDE retreat. A thirty room buy-out at a venue I’d never set foot in with a team that had never worked together this way. And here’s the real kicker: we had zero identified members. Most of us had never even attended a retreat, let alone hosted one.
But we booked it anyway. 120 days out.
Cart before the horse.
People could have thought we were reckless. But we didn’t. Because we had a clear end goal and we were confident in our ability to get there.
So here’s what happened instead: everything. Because the deadline existed, roles got identified fast and clear lanes were made. Decisions that would have taken months in a “let’s plan this carefully” world got made in hours. We didn’t have the luxury of overthinking, which turned out to be the greatest gift we could have given ourselves.
We learned quickly when you commit to the outcome before you know the path, the path reveals itself with a kind of urgency that planning can never manufacture. You stop asking should we? and start asking how will we? Those are very different questions. One keeps you still. The other moves you forward.
We filled all 30 rooms and had the retreat of a lifetime. Since then we’re retreat hosting bandits.
All because we said yes before we had the answers.
[Read more about how the retreat unfolded here]
Before they teach you to wait
My three-year-old cart before the horse’s all the time without overthinking it.
He lines up couch cushions and announces: “Jump in everyone! Climb aboard the train. We’re heading to California!”
The train is cushions. The tickets are invisible.. though he’s absolutely collecting them upon entry. There are no tracks and no schedule. But none of that matters to him because he has already committed. We are going to California.
From there he starts to build the trip in real time. He assigns me a seat, then his dad, then his little brother. Tells us to hold on tight and announces the stops along the way. Thirsty? he’ll stop the entire operation to serve drinks before starting up again. He solves every problem in real time because the destination is that real to him.
He didn’t wait until he had a train to commit to the trip. He said yes to California and then he built everything else around his yes.
Cart before the horse.
Kids do this all the time because they haven’t been taught to wait yet. To plan the steps first in order to get to the final outcome. He still lives in the world as it actually works.
But somewhere along the way, most of us learn to reverse the order: have the answer before you speak, prove you can do the thing before you do it.
It starts in school where the right answer matters more than the attempt. Gets reinforced in job applications that ask you to prove you’ve already done the thing before they’ll let you do it. And shows up again in performance reviews that reward the person who didn’t take unnecessary risks.
Society calls this wisdom or maturity or being realistic.
But the cost shows up later.. in the version of us we never met. The city we never moved to. The business idea that hid in the notes app for years. The life that was always imagined but never lived.
Waiting feels like safety but it’s not. It’s just postponing the moment you find out what you’re actually capable of.
So here’s our invitation
We know the people who build lives the rest of us only think about are the ones willing to bet on the ending before they know the middle.
Not recklessly but with so much clarity on what they wanted that the unknown didn’t matter more than the destination itself.
So if you’re sitting in the maybe stage. If you’re waiting for the plan to arrive fully formed. If you’re one “yes” away from the life you actually want but you’re still calculating the risks..
Know this: you will figure it out. Because once you’ve committed, your brain has no choice. The clarity of the destination becomes a force and the roadmap builds itself because it has to.
So say yes to the thing you want so clearly.
Book the flights. Sign the lease. Send the email. Tell someone out loud. Do the thing that makes the outcome feel inevitable. Then build the train.
It might not unfold like you pictured. But you’ll be further. And each time you do it, the next one gets easier.
Until eventually you’re living a life that simply wouldn’t exist if you’d waited to be ready.
so many beautiful lessons, I'm eternally thankful that I get to create along side you.
Ps. we host the best retreats on substack
This is so true, we are conditioned to wait. A good reminder of the life waiting for us!