The Fallacy Of Taking Action

Life: It’s All About Taking Action – Or Is It?

I’ve been a student as well as a teacher of personal development techniques for a couple of decades. I think I’ve read or heard just about any self help guru worth his stripes say that taking action is essential to success in any endeavor. And for the most part I’d agree.

I’ve also listened to and read the many laments of people who claim to have carried out the steps of one self help program or another and have been able to claim little or no success. Why is that? Stay tuned, you’re gonna be surprised.

I’m a member of several online communities where success in various areas of life is the topic. And if I had a buck for every time I saw someone or heard someone say “you need to take action, man…” you and I could hit Vegas for a long weekend with the loot I’d collect. It seems to be the latest mindless mantra – TAKE ACTION!

Practice Makes Perfect – Or Does It?

I think almost everyone would agree that to gain proficiency at anything worthwhile it takes practice. When I was a young teen I picked up a guitar as many have done and began to learn how to play. I had a friend show me a few chords to start and then I began to figure things out for myself. After about a year I decided to take lessons. I thought I was going to impress the teacher with what I learned on my own. Boy, was I in for a surprise.

During the first lesson I played my best stuff for this guy. He listened and watched as I played. When I was finished he said, “Not bad.” Then he asked me to play a certain passage again. When I was finished he explained that I was forming two important chords in a way that would hinder my playing if I planned on getting better. I remember the queasy feeling I got as he spoke.

Then I told him that’s how I preferred to play and that I could work the chords my way. In return, he told me that he wouldn’t have me as a student if I continued to play the wrong way. I told him that I’d practiced that way for several hours every day for nearly a year and that it would be hard to change at this point in time. I eventually relented but it wasn’t easy to change after learning it my way. So what’s the point?

Practice The Right Stuff…

The point is simple. Yes, it takes practice to achieve many admirable goals. But the old saying that practice makes perfect isn’t correct, far from it. A more accurate way to put it would be, perfect practice makes perfect. See, if you’re doing something wrong it really doesn’t matter how much you practice because your results will usually be way off.

The same thing goes for taking action. I’ve been in business for a long time. Back in the 1990s I became a real estate investor. I’d taken several real estate investing seminars and actually went out and put many of the techniques to productive use. The techniques seemed to come easy to me. I loved what I was doing and had considerable success with it.

Real estate led me into writing and that’s how I make my living today. I also market certain products online. I wish I could say that online marketing came as easily as investing in real estate but I can’t. I’m not going to go through a blow by blow description of my online business history but I will say this. I started selling stuff online in the late 1990s part time. Then around 2003 –03 I began to get more serious about it.

Back then it was much easier to put up a Website and reach the first page of many search engines. I began writing digital how-to books and they began to sell fairly well. Still I was only doing this part time but I was seriously considering making it my full time gig.

I Come Back To Find The Stars Misplaced…

At the end of 2005 I became sick. It took me all of 2006 and some of 2007 to get well. I didn’t get back online in a serious way until 2008. And let me tell you, things had changed a lot. And here’s the thing. I went about my business just as I had back in the earlier part of the decade.

And nothing much happened. I wasn’t able to sell squat. I was more than willing to put in the time, or take action. But I was taking the wrong type of action. I was trying to work my business according to the way things were several years before. And that wasn’t cutting it.

And that’s the whole point of this piece, taking the right type of action. So many people are just plain nuts to go out and make something happen that they forget to make a plan first. And the plan isn’t even the first thing you want to do anyway. The first thing you should do before knocking yourself out with anything is determine if what you’re trying to accomplish is even feasible. That’s called market research.

Be Smart, Plan & Take The Right Action

Many of the people who claim that they’ve taken action but produced no results have been taking the wrong type of action. Now, if someone is truly persistent and continues even with the wrong actions there’s a chance he will eventually discover the right way to go about accomplishing his goal. Depending on what account you believe, Edison discovered more than ten thousand ways not to create the light bulb. So for him, doing it wrong paid off.

But setting out to do something that hasn’t been done before is far different than most things where there are many who’ve been successful following a proven path. And that’s my whole point. Taking action is noble. It’s commendable. It’s even smart. But be sure it’s the right action or else you might have to spend a whole bunch of time unlearning how to play a D chord.