We all have goals that we want to achieve in our lives. These goals may include learning a new language, eating healthier and losing weight, becoming a better parent, saving more money, and so on. But there’s a point when you need to stop planning these goals and start working towards them. It can be easy to assume that the gap between where you are now and where you want to be in the future is caused by a lack of knowledge. This is why we buy courses on how to start a business or how to lose weight fast or how to learn a new language or how to make much in life. We assume that if we knew about a better strategy, then we would get better results. We believe that a new result requires new knowledge. Learning something new and practicing something new may seem very similar, but these two methods can have profoundly different results. Here are some additional ways to think about the difference.
• Let’s say your goal is to get stronger and fit: You can research the best instructions on bench press technique, but the only way to build strength is to practice lifting weights.
• Let’s say your goal is to grow your startup: You can learn about the best way to make a sales pitch, but the only way to actually land customers is to practice making sales calls.
• You can talk to a best-selling author about writing, but the only way become a better writer is to practice publishing consistently.
• Enough with all the thinking already!
Now, you need to drive action. Ideas are great but someone has to put them in motion for them to be worthwhile and deciding to do that is no easy task. Acting on a decision can be terrifying, especially in the case of large-scale change. Your decision may affect a significant number of people, and what if it is the wrong decision? What if things do not go as expected and the resulting outcome negatively impacts you or your organization? You could lose your job. Worse, hundreds of other people could lose theirs. It is hard enough to act on decisions when just facing your own insecurities. Throw the complexities of your organization into the mix and the angst increases exponentially. Politics, lack of resources, uncertainty, doubt, and fear all mess with our minds right when we are on the verge of taking action.
The only way we can get substantial work done is by focusing on one goal in a specified period of time, and making productive progress during that set aside time. How can we do this, when there are so many options, considerations… distractions? In order to eliminate distractions and focus our efforts into doing in one specific direction, we must know what is important. And I almost mean to know in the Biblical sense. You should intimately understand what is important to you. Why are you doing what you are setting yourself out to accomplish? Perhaps what you are doing is pointless – or serves no purpose. Or, perhaps you simply needed to dig a bit deeper to understand what purpose it serves. If you know why what you intend to do is important, you will discover motivation and can ignite a fire in your belly to do the work. If you know what is important, you can better eliminate all the distractions and unimportant things and do things that matter. You can kill the analysis paralysis, think less, and do more. Stop thinking, and start doing.
(The author is a teacher at Govt. Higher Secondary School Damhall Anantnag. Views are exclusively his own)
[email protected]
