You’re Not Ready Yet…

A few years ago, I went fishing with a guide who knew exactly what he was doing. He wanted to take me somewhere technical — tough footing, a deep wade, difficult casting. I like that kind of challenge, so I said yes.

Another angler in our group, newer to fly fishing, asked to come along.

The guide looked at him and said, flat out: “You’re not ready.”

I laughed at the time. It felt blunt, maybe even a little harsh. But the guide wasn’t being unkind. He’d watched this angler enough to know what that water would do to him. It wasn’t about talent or effort. It was timing. Wading in over his head — literally — wouldn’t have taught him anything except that fly fishing is miserable. It would have set him back further than it moved him forward.

Both the guide and I still fish water like that today. We come out of it tired, sometimes outsmarted by the fish, but we can break it down on the drive home — what we’d do differently, what we learned, what to tie for next time. That’s only possible because we were ready enough to survive the lesson.

Years later, I fish that same water with the angler who asked to come along that day. He’s ready now. We fish it often. Sometimes we catch, most often we don’t. But because he’s ready, he isn’t frustrated — he’s engaged. We have the same retrospective on the drive home: what we could have tried, what flies we’re tying for next time. When you aren’t ready, you’re frustrated. When you are, you want to figure it out.

This happens constantly at work, and it rarely gets said out loud.

An employee wants the stretch project, promotion, or bigger client. The manager knows, or should know, the person isn’t ready for it yet. But instead of saying so, the manager hands it over anyway — maybe to avoid the conversation, maybe to avoid looking like they’re holding someone back, maybe because saying no feels like a career-limiting move for the manager, not just the employee.

The employee takes it on and struggles. Sometimes fails outright.

And that failure doesn’t stay contained to the one project. It becomes reputational. Other managers hear about it. Future opportunities quietly narrow — not because the person lacks potential, but because the room now has a story about them that isn’t true yet.

Telling someone “not yet” is not the same as telling someone “no.”

The guide didn’t tell the newer angler he’d never be ready. He told him he wasn’t ready now — with the guide’s judgment, not the angler’s, doing the work of protecting him from a lesson he wasn’t set up to survive.

That’s the job. If you have someone who isn’t ready, the kindest thing you can do is not to hand them the project and hope. It’s to keep them out of harm’s way and mentor them up to it — so that when the water gets deep, they’re ready to wade into it, and come out the other side with a story worth telling.

See you at the after party,

Ringo “HRNasty” Nishioka

nasty: an unreal maneuver of incredible technique, something that is ridiculously good, tricky, and manipulative but with a result that can’t help but be admired, a phrase used to describe someone good at something. “He has a nasty forkball”.

Ongoing writing and context live on LinkedIn and Bluesky.

**Did this article change how you see career decisions?**

Get Career Reality Updates from the other side of the management table.

Ringo Nishioka writes about how executives and managers actually make decisions about your career inside organizations.