The importance of adopting a bias for action

Sometimes I turn to past and present teachers to learn and to be inspired. This time I’m talking with them about action. And boy, do they have a lot to say about it!

Ambition is not what a man would do, but what a man does, for ambition without action is fantasy.

- Bryant H. McGill

Action is the secret ingredient of success. Or better, the silent ingredient of success, because it’s hardly a secret as many of the quotes in this article will show. Yet action most often is the difference between successful and unsuccessful people.

Successful people take action!

You see, in life, lots of people know what to do, but few people actually do what they know. Knowing is not enough! You must take action.

- Tony Robbins

Successful people take action, unsuccessful people don’t. It is by taking action that we change reality and it is by taking action that we get results. They may not always be the results we are looking for, but they are results nonetheless. They provide us with feedback we can use to take another action, that has a better chance of producing the results we desire.

But actions do even more than just produce results and feedback. Let’s take a second and listen to what Aristotle has to say to us:

We become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.

- Aristotle

Our actions define us. We become brave by acting brave. Not by thinking brave or knowing what brave means! It is what we do that matters, it is the way we change reality that matters. Knowing a lot about it or thinking a lot about it, just isn’t enough.

Thoughts are not unimportant

But don’t think that thinking is not important! Thinking brave or thinking about success doesn’t make you brave or successful, yet it is a start. A necessary start even, as Emerson tells us:

The ancestor of every action is a thought.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every action is the child of a thought, so we need to think before we act. Now this makes for a nice twist! Because how many times have you wished that you would have thought before you did something? Or told someone else to think before they act? Technically you (and they) did! But the lack of results (or the consequences of the action anyway) are not blamed on the action, but on the thought (or absence thereof).

This is where Goethe has something to teach us:

Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one’s thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Now Goethe was a very intelligent bloke, and thinking might be easier for him than for most people. But that doesn’t take away the message he’s bringing across. It is the deliberate transformation of our thoughts into our actions that proves difficult.

But this insight was not caused by merely thinking. Goethe couldn’t have thought of this logic, without knowing how to put thoughts into action. And he obviously experienced failure, or different results than expected. And the only way of getting that knowledge is by putting things in action. Wouldn’t you agree Friedrich?

An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.

- Friedrich Engels

Right! But you should give a little consideration towards your thoughts and actions, as Abu Bakr points out so clearly:

Without knowledge action is useless and knowledge without action is futile.

- Abu Bakr

So thoughts are important, and action makes it happen. Not every thought deserves action, so pick your actions wise. Mindless action will give mindless results, but by doing so it will still give you feedback.

Adopt a bias for action

Adopting a bias for action is what you need to do on a habitual level to get things moving. Napoleon Hill wrote Think and grow rich, but he knows that thinking alone just doesn’t cut it:

Create a definite plan for carrying out your desire and begin at once, whether you ready or not, to put this plan into action.

- Napoleon Hill

To change reality in such a way that it produces the results you want to see, requires a bias toward action. It’s not only motivational gurus that will tell you this. Listen to Indira Ghandi, India’s first and to date only female prime minister:

Have a bias toward action - let’s see something happen now. You can break that big plan into small steps and take the first step right away.

- Indira Gandhi

And Churchill formulated a bias for action in a negative way:

I never worry about action, but only inaction.

- Winston Churchill

The key then is to take action. Because even if you know who you are, what you want, why you want it, and even how to get there, nothing will happen if you do not take action.