Take Action Now

September 29th, 2009

“The path to success is to take massive, determined action.” – Tony Robbins

Essentially all learning is a process of trial and error. You try something, if it doesn’t work you learn from it and don’t do it again, if it does work, you stick to it and repeat the process for repeated success. You can get all the hyped up bull filled marketing books that you want, but none of them compare to simply taking action, repeated action.
Lets compare two 2 situations:

Take no action – You stay within your comfort zone and read a few more books on the subject, analyze how much you would make and how long it would take. You are probably one of the best versed non action taking people in your niche of work (or non-work), happy days.
2 years down the line: Even though you have amassed tonnes of knowledge, you are still in the position you were externally 2 years ago.

Take action – You decide that you will simply start taking lots of action to work against your goal, proverbially throw things against the wall and see what sticks. Along the way you get a few scratches and bumps and see what happens. You read maybe half of the books you would have if you were taking no action.

2 years down the line: You are making huge dents into your goals by using knowledge that you pick up along the way plus invaluable real world experience.

Or another example, who would you rather teach you a skill? someone who has read about the subject for 10 years, or someone who has practised it for 5? I hope your answer was the second person.

Nothing substitutes for real world experience. Imagine trying to transition from amateur footballer up to playing for your country in one step, its not going to happen, the trial and error weeds out the weak who don’t have the motivation.determination to achieve the goal and the strong come out on top.

As Stephen Covey says, the map is not the territory. What you have inside your head may seem totally logical to you, but in reality it may be totally flawed. For example, You see lots of people starting blogs or planning to get up at 5am consistently, and they fail after huge preparation, wouldn’t that time be better spent trying different techniques for rising early.
This also works vice versa. You can be completely terrified of the girl in your class who you’d like to talk to, do it and you will realise its not as bad as you thought and that she may even like you back.

This is how the professionals do it. 99% of people who are extremely successful, so-called “gurus”, have succeeded through this method. They must fail plenty of times before they succeed in an area, its a fact of life, there are many more paths for failure than paths to success.

Start taking action today
Start taking action towards your goals. Any action is better than none. Do that homework assignment you’ve been putting off, get out that door and run or stop putting start talking to that member of the opposite sex, and you will realise the power of taking action consistently. Do it today, not tomorrow, get into the habit of making regular.