My friend Troy and I went for ice-cream yesterday. (It’s a ritual of ours.) Troy asked me what tomorrow’s post was going to be about and I came up with twenty possible ideas… but I have forgotten them all. This happens.
So instead I ask everyone to say hello to Troy and I will write about something else instead.
No, wait! Here’s one of the things I mentioned.
Nothing beats action
Nothing.
Nothing.
Action trumps education, natural gifts, pheromones and luck.
One grain of action kicks the pants of a million good intentions.
It choke-slams a googleplex of potential.
Action, darlings. Nothing happens without it.
Scary as hell, isn’t it?
Sure it is, but there’s something that might reassure you…
I’m not talking about The Right Action.
I’m not talking about Effective Action.
Those ideas evaluate your action in terms of what it will get you. This disheartens the hell out of us, because we know at first our actions might get us… bupkis. It might lead us to write a post that never gets published. It might lead us to develop a product that sells zero copies. So we think of those actions as worthless and we don’t even bother.
Here’s a better way to think about it…
All action is positive.
Action starts to build that wonderful thing called momentum. And its big brother, acceleration.
*brief physics lesson*
Momentum is an object moving at a set velocity (unless friction and daddy issues gets in its way). Momentum is a glorious feeling after having been at rest for a long time.
Acceleration, however, is an object moving at an ever-increasing velocity. Every second you’re moving you go a little faster, until soon enough you’re going twice as fast as you were, then four times as fast, then a hundred times as fast, until you get a ticket from the Entrepreneurial Police for making everyone look bad.
*put the chalk back down*
Accelerating too fast is scary, and I bet some of you are a leetle freaked out about the idea of going a hundred time faster than you are now. But remember yesterday’s post about brain-lifting? Same thing here. The process of making your first action, then getting your first momentum, and then starting to accelerate, goes as slowly as you do. If you want to take off from the line like a Formula 1 racer, you can. If starting more like a steam engine is your cup of tea*, then you’ll build much slower. It’s cool.
The key part is the action. Without the action you never get anywhere. And it really doesn’t matter what action you take.
Your five-minute mission, should you choose to accept it…
Guess, I dare you.
Well done! Yep, five minutes of action. Start an email you need to send. Brainstorm domain names. Find those papers. Just act.
And when you’re done, come tell me in the comments!
*Ha! A physics joke!