Education leads to action.

Or as one of my personal heroes, Henry Rollins, puts it:

Knowledge without mileage equals bullshit.

There’s a limit on how much you can study without implementing the stuff you’ve learned. There’s a time when you have to stop buying and reading yet another perspective on a subject you already know and you have to start doing it.

Learning as avoidance

Ever read an article on Copyblogger or checked in to a useful forum instead of writing your own content (or developing a product or answering a customer email or whatever it is you felt you should have been really doing)? It’s such a sneaky way to avoid work, because you can claim to yourself, “Hey! I’m working here! I’m learning new techniques! That’ll help me when I get around to doing that thing…”

It can work on a bigger scale, too. I’d been considering starting this website for years before we did it, and every time I felt I was close to getting started I’d buy another infoproduct instead. It was in many ways the best way I could delay: I’m writing a super-long list of some of the resources I have bought and they are doozies! So much smart stuff in there. But for a long time I had all the smart in there and I did nothing with it… other than acquire yet more smart. If I didn’t have a Day Job and relatively few financial commitments, this would have been the Catherine-Goes-Bankrupt phase.

Action in learning

When you’re reading/watching/listening to all those resources, you know the part where they say, “Here’s a useful exercise…” and you pretend like you did it but really you sorta answer the questions in your head and so the next section, which builds on your answers from the first, is much less useful and you disengage? Yeah, I didn’t think that was just me. Fill in the worksheets. Complete the assignments. Be accountable to yourself.

Because otherwise you have a learning hobby, not a business. If you’re like me that’s a fun hobby – I love to learn. But there has never been success created by just having knowledge in your head. You have to do something with that knowledge to succeed.

Your 5-minute mission, should you choose to accept it…

1. Make a list of all the resources you’ve learned from in the last month, including blogs, infoproducts, Awesomeness Consulting, books, TV, wise old men on the subway…

2. For each one, list one action you could take as a result of that learning.

3. Go and do it. I bet you $63.92 that you’ll see far more success than you saw last month. And maybe last year.

What’s one of the actions you’ll be doing? (Bonus points if it’s one that we inspired!) Tell us in the comments!

photo credit: RodneyRamsey

Design is a scary word to most of us, but here’s one guideline that will make it easier for you to decide what’s right.

1. Write down the three most important actions you want someone to take on your website:

• signing up for the newsletter
• reading the blog
• requesting a quote
• buying your product
• writing a comment
• sharing a link

2. Get someone else to look at your homepage and ask them to identify the three elements they notice first.

Are they the same three things you want people to act on? If not, it’s time to tweak your design. The most important tasks should be the most obvious visual elements, and everything else should fade into the background.

Do your important tasks leap out to the eye, or do you need to redesign? Tell us in the comments!