Let me start this post by saying that Ted Danson is a national treasure. What I love most about him is that he stays in his lane. He knows exactly what he’s good at, and he sticks to it. He doesn’t pretend to be or do more. Simple. Elegant. Funny.

So, when I discovered he had a podcast, I was all in. I don’t listen to it all the time, but I tune in when he has a guest I’m interested in. One of his more recent guests was an actress I used to like back in the ’90s: Helen Hunt.

They talked about her career and everything she’s been involved in. The reason I like her is because she stars in one of my favorite movies: As Good as It Gets. It really is a movie from a different era. A lot of the humor probably wouldn’t land today, but it had a simple premise and explored it in interesting ways. It was fun, straightforward, and entertaining—everything you want in a movie.

When she talked about this film on the podcast, she said something I thought was rather profound. And it wasn’t a dot I had ever connected with that movie before. She said the core idea of the film was this: “That which we cling to to protect us ultimately imprisons us.”

Her character clings to her son. Jack Nicholson’s character clings to his compulsions. Greg Kinnear’s character clings to his beauty. When you look at the movie through that lens, it becomes a lot deeper than I think anyone intended it to be.

But that idea is exactly what I want to talk about in this post.

I think it’s an insight that can reveal all the ways we limit ourselves. When she said that, I immediately knew what my “thing” was. For me, it’s security—the safe option. You look a few moves ahead and then backtrack to the path that leads to the most secure outcome.

I’ve done this my whole life. The biggest example? I spent years in a career that kept me safe but ultimately felt like a prison. I spent years yearning to do something more meaningful, but I could never imagine a way out of the trap I had built for myself. Because the thing I was clinging to—security—was blinding me to what I really wanted.

But when I finally took a leap of faith, quitting my job at 30 and going back to school, I realized that the security I had was just an illusion. You see, you will adapt to any decision you make. The hardest part of any true change is taking that first step.

Will Smith (bless his slappy soul) once did an interview where he talked about the power of a decision. Check it out:

Source: The Most Trusted Source of Billionaire Wisdom Youtube Channel

The antidote, then, to being imprisoned by the things we use to protect ourselves is to make a decision. Look back at every major shift or change in your life. The genesis of each one always revolves around a decision.

We make decisions every day, but we’re often unaware that we’re even deciding. And yet, these decisions shape us. Each micro-decision is like nudging the steering wheel of your life just a bit. You don’t notice the shift in the moment, but over time, those small turns can put you on a completely different course.

Another great movie that explores this concept is The Butterfly Effect, starring Ashton Kutcher and Amy Smart. Kutcher’s character, Evan, discovers he can time travel by reading his old childhood journals. Not only does he transport himself back to moments in his life, but he can also make changes that alter the course of his future.

The movie explores these changes in dark but often humorous ways. Each small shift he makes in the past sends him into a future that’s vastly different from the one he came from. Hence, the “butterfly effect”—the idea that the flap of a butterfly’s wings in one part of the world can cause a tsunami on the other side.

What’s interesting about time travel movies is how they awaken this desire in us to go back and fix our regrets. I bet you can think of several moments in your life you’d like to do over.

But what we almost never realize is that we don’t need time travel to have that kind of power over our lives. This moment—right here, right now—is an opportunity to shift your life toward the future you want.

Maybe, instead of focusing on the past and wishing something had been different, we should shift our attention to the present. We can imagine we’re time travelers sent from the future to this moment to change something. That the decisions we make today can ultimately free us from the prisons we created yesterday.

I look back at the risk I took when I quit my job and went back to school. That one decision shaped the next decade of my life. And at the time, I thought it was a permanent shift into a new career. So if you had told that version of me that it would all crash and burn—that I’d end up becoming an alcoholic and running back to my old, secure job—I would’ve laughed in your face.

You don’t think there were countless moments after I left teaching when I wished I could go back and change things? I made plenty of bad decisions after that. Ones I’m still paying for. Massive student loan debt. A huge tax bill (I raided my retirement account to survive those unpaid summer months as a teacher). Weight gain. Chronic back pain.

I spent so much time after quitting teaching drinking and wallowing in misery, desperate to rewrite the past. Feeling sorry for myself. Feeling lost and adrift, with no purpose. And not one minute of that self-pity did a damn thing to make my present better.

No, it wasn’t until I made a decision to start paying those debts back that things began to change. How long did I avoid dealing with that tax bill because it felt too big to handle in a single day? But every day I avoided it was just another day I dragged it around with me like a ball and chain. It wasn’t until I decided to start making payments that the weight began to lift. Every payment brings me one day closer to freedom.

The same is true for everything in our lives. We let big problems intimidate us because we can’t fix them in one day. And because we can’t fix them today, we put them off, telling ourselves that maybe tomorrow we’ll figure out how to unload it all. But what we don’t realize is that every day we wait is just another day we continue living in the pain of it.

How often do we say we’ll start our diet on Monday because we can’t lose all the weight today? But today is the only day we have to do anything about it. Tomorrow never comes if you keep kicking the can down the road. You won’t lose 100 pounds overnight. But you can lose 0.2 pounds overnight. And if you keep losing 0.2 pounds every day, in 500 days you’ll have lost 100 pounds.

Okay, so being faithful to a diet for 500 days sounds incredibly daunting. But that time will pass whether you lose the weight or not. And here’s the thing, the struggle won’t always feel as hard as it does right now. The more you choose to eat better, the easier it becomes. The more you exercise, the stronger you get.

So no, you might not be able to change the big things all at once. But you can chip away at them. One decision at a time. One day at a time. Until eventually, they disappear.

You don’t need to have the perfect plan or know exactly how it’s all going to work out. You just need to make a decision and take one honest step in the right direction. That’s how change begins—not with a grand gesture, but with the quiet courage to stop waiting and start moving.

Every big change you’ve ever wanted is built on a series of small choices. And the truth is, you’re never really stuck, you’re just one decision away from a different path. So stop waiting for the perfect time. It’s not coming. Start today.