When Everything Else Fails – Act!

“Success consists of going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.” – Winston Churchill

• Action Is Key

It all begins with the word you hear on a movie set: “Action!”

It’s the key to success. I can’t tell you how many promising entrepreneurs I’ve met that never quite met their potential because they research and endlessly dawdle rather than taking bold action.

But you might say, as I’ve heard from so many others over the years, “I don’t know what to do! I need to learn this more first.”
This is a recipe for stagnation. Endlessly prototyping and conducting market research will ultimately stymie you from making progress. You can very easily mistake activity for taking action, when it truly is making bold strides forward to implementing and bringing your idea into the world that counts.

Don’t get me wrong. Learning is great and essential to your success, no question! But it should be done in tandem with taking action. I think one of the bigger mistakes we make as a society is planting the idea in our young people that education and learning is a wholly distinct part of life. We train them to see their school and educational years as a time of idyll in which they solely focus on knowledge gathering, putting off until later the need to take action.

In reality, you should always be doing and you should always be learning. If you’re going to build an online business, you will surely need to learn some new things along the way. But you must come to think of it as learning how to fly the plane once you are already in the cockpit.

One of the best teachers you can find will be the actions you take. These need to be deliberate and purposely taken actions, with the right dose of examining your results with a ruthless eye toward determining what you could have done better. But don’t let this analysis prevent you from moving forward. In all that you do, your instinctive bias should be toward taking decisive action. This means that you will need to become comfortable with making decisions based on imperfect information. The moment that you let go of the harmful notion that you can never make a mistake, you will have set yourself up to be able to move ahead swiftly.

Hard work and following through is what sets apart those who succeed from those who talk and dream about it.

• Be Fearless

Dawdling endlessly on research is often a sign of fear. It reflects a lack of confidence in one’s ability to strike out on a new initiative or their capacity to absorb the effects of taking a risk.

Exorcising that fear is the first step to moving on and taking action. You may find that it helps to identify what exactly it is that you’re afraid and learn to not compare yourself to the ideal state. Even if you may fall short of your vision, that’s no reason to not try. I certainly haven’t accomplished everything I want in business already; that gap between where I am and where I know I can be is precisely what keeps me motivated to keep going on and tackling new challenges each day.

• Jumping In

Luckily there are countless people out there, including many young people, who are showing no qualms about diving into entrepreneurship head first. They’re showing that there is no need to go through an expensive business school program and lengthy apprenticeship before they begin getting their hands dirty.

Many of them start out today with smaller ventures as micro-preneurs, using platforms like Kickstarter and Etsy that allow them to quickly scale up their ideas and reach customers. These tools provide a low-risk way to begin learning about market segmentation, customer service, and the other “meat and potatoes” essentials of small business. The beauty of the online world is that all of the old gate keepers that could prevent you from getting started are essentially gone. You don’t have to have a sponsor to get started. It’s great to have a mentor, but you now have agency to just get going. You don’t need anyone’s permission to write an e-book or begin selling crafts you’ve made or offering your services as a consultant. You can leap in and get right to it.

• A Bias for Action

It’s true no matter how large your enterprise is. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, actually has codified this ethos into the DNA of his company by making it one of the organization’s guiding precepts. Having a “bias for action” listed as one of six core values at Amazon. What this means in practice is that employees are incentivized and encouraged to figure out how to solve challenges proactively rather than waiting around for directives from others. By instilling this same principle in the other members of your team, you can create an organization that instinctively leans toward cutting red tape and excuses for not acting.

Bezos first adopted this concept on an individual basis when he left a lucrative Wall Street position to pursue his vision of Amazon. He was successful as a trader and earning a good living. Yet he had a hunch about the power of online retailing that he could not shake, particularly in the emerging area of book sales. Some others may have held on to their day job for far longer, preferring to research the idea and discuss it with contacts until every potential challenge had been identified and solved.

After all, Bezos was new to online retailing and the book business, so the odds were good that he could fail. Yet he adopted a mentality that he has called a “regret minimization framework”, in which he looks at his long-term decision making through the perspective of reducing regrets that he will have in old age.

Adopting such a perspective will almost invariable cause you to lean toward the direction of taking risks and action. The results have obviously paid off for Bezos, who has gone on to be one of the wealthiest individuals in the world, far wealthier than he could have possibly attained had he stayed on the conventional and safe track. More importantly, he has also left a huge imprint on the world, changing how online retailing is conducted and spreading his penchant for taking action into bold investments in emerging technology like drone delivery and deep space exploration.

Obviously most success stories aren’t as profound as the creation of Amazon, but you will undoubtedly learn a tremendous amount by getting on with your idea and rolling your sleeves up. Adopt your own risk minimization framework. What will you most regret later on in life? An old adage says that we almost always regret the things that we did not do more than the things we did. So why not take a chance and act on your entrepreneurial instinct?

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