Thinking vs Doing vs Both

Posted in Goals & Time Management, Personal Development  Print This

Many of the investing seminars I’ve been to emphasize how:

1) You don’t have to know everything in order to get started

2) People use thinking as an excuse to procrastinate and delay taking action

3) Better to do somethink and make mistakes than not at all,

4) Ready, Fire, Aim, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum

I agree with all of the above, but with the understanding that most of the seminars where these things were repeated over and over again were for beginners.  In these events, making half of the content motivation-based is probably a necessity, as an enormous amount of people who pay for information do not end up applying it.

It also serves the teachers in setting the attendees up to “take action” at the end and buy whatever course or upsell is available at the back table.

Here are my thoughts about action vs thinking:

1) Action-oriented people tend to make more money and make it faster than thinker-brained folks

2) Action-oriented people, while making more money, tend to be constantly busy and overwhelmed with business (because they are doing deals, which is a good problem to have compared to an empty planner and matching bank account

3) At some point, though, you will have to start thinking again in order to make some kind of order and peace in your business and your life.

4) This, then, will require someone to balance meeting today’s needs and goals (action) with planning and creating processes and systems (thinking).

5) This is hard to do, as most folks are either one or the other, but must be done and with the right proportions.

The pathway to progress is, then, to FIRST become used to taking action without having all the facts or everything in place (unless you already are), and THEN learning how to force yourself to take a few hours per week and EXAMINE the way you’re doing things and devise ways to do things better.

Of course, how to document and store what you create, and how to set the habit in yourself and others in referring to it and using what you’ve devised is a different story.  This whole process, by the way, is covered in my course How to Write Your Own Systems, which I’ve started adding as a bonus for those who buy The Assistant Who Pays Their Own Salary.

But for now, I just want to emphasize that action is good, thinking is good later on, and doing both is the key to getting free of your business.