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There’s a particular kind of waiting many people live in without noticing it. Life will really start once the promotion comes through, once the business hits a certain revenue, once the house is paid off, once the next milestone arrives. Each plan feels like the thing standing between now and the life that’s supposed to follow it.
John Lennon’s line, written for his son Sean, captures how easily that waiting becomes the whole story. While attention stays fixed on the next milestone, the ordinary days in between, the ones actually making up a life, pass by mostly unnoticed. The plan isn’t the problem. Treating the plan as more real than the present is.
Planning and Presence Aren’t Actually in Competition
Here’s where the quote is often misread. It isn’t an argument against planning altogether, Lennon himself was famously deliberate about his work and his family life. The real tension is between making plans and disappearing into them so completely that the present stops registering at all.
Picture two people both working toward the same long-term goal, building a business to a certain size. One spends every day mentally living five years ahead, treating the current stage as something to get through rather than something happening. The other works just as hard toward the same goal, but stays present enough to notice the small wins, the team member who grew into a new role, the client relationship that deepened, the lesson learned from a failed launch. Both reach the goal eventually, assuming they do. Only one of them actually experienced the years it took to get there.
Instead of only asking “what’s my next milestone,” it helps to ask a quieter question: what’s actually happening right now that I’m too focused on the plan to notice? A plan pulls attention toward a point on the horizon. Life, mostly, happens in the space between here and there, and that space is easy to miss entirely if the horizon is the only thing being watched.
Presence Is Built Through Small Interruptions to the Plan
Staying present doesn’t usually happen automatically just because someone decides it should. It tends to come from small, repeated interruptions to the forward-looking habit, actually noticing a conversation instead of half-listening while thinking about tomorrow’s to-do list, actually registering a small win instead of immediately moving the target further out. These interruptions feel minor individually, but they’re what keeps a plan from swallowing the life it was supposed to be building.
Plans get interrupted constantly, by illness, by unexpected opportunity, by simple bad luck. When that happens, it can feel like the years spent working toward the plan were wasted, since the destination changed. Lennon’s quote offers a quieter reading of that same event. The years weren’t spent waiting for a life that never arrived, they were already the life, whether the plan landed exactly as expected or not.
This isn’t a lesson to apply once and consider finished. Plans keep forming, new milestones keep appearing on the horizon, and the pull to live mentally ahead of the present never fully goes away. Staying present tends to be less about one big realization and more about a habit of regularly checking in on where your attention actually is, rather than only checking off what’s been completed.
How to Put This Into Practice
You don’t need to give up your goals to live by this idea, you just need to notice when the goal has started crowding out the days meant to lead you there.
At work: are you present for the actual work in front of you, or mentally already at the next review, the next raise, the next title?
In business: are you noticing the small wins happening now, a loyal customer, a strong month, a team member stepping up, or only measuring everything against a future target that keeps moving further out?
In personal life: are you fully in the conversation, the evening, the ordinary Tuesday happening right now, or quietly waiting for a bigger moment to start paying attention? The plan will still be there in an hour. This moment won’t be.
The Bottom Line
Lennon’s quote challenges a habit many people never question: treating the present as a waiting room for a better, future version of life. In reality, the present is the only part of the plan that’s actually happening.
Making plans doesn’t mean abandoning the here and now. It means holding both at once, which is likely why a line written in a quiet moment for a young child has stayed this relevant, this long, for people who’ve never even heard the song it came from.
