Do

All of the inspiration, motivation, great thoughts and speeches are nothing without the action required to back them up.  You can talk a big game.  You can have grand plans.  You can say whatever you want, but until you actually take action, and do something, nothing gets done.  It’s that simple.  People make all kinds of noise every day about this thing or that, this issue or that, this injustice or that, but until they get off their ass and do something about it, words are nothing but wind.

When finally you do get around to doing something, spend your time doing something that moves you.  You have to realize that you can do anything, but you can’t do everything.  You only have so many hours in the day, days in the week, months in the year.  You can’t be in two places at once, so you have to choose what you will do. 

You have to spend the time on the things that will make the most difference in lives you want to impact.  Whether that’s your life, your family’s life, or your countries life, you have to decide.   What will you do?

When you decide what work you are going to do, do the work, but make the result of your work useful. There is no point in doing the work if no one is going to use it.  How many dreams have people dreamt, that when unfulfilled because they didn’t do the work?  Or worse they did the work, and then they didn’t use it.

When you are working towards a dream, follow it all the way through.  What you will realize on your journey is there is a difference between knowing the path, and walking the path.  You can look at a basketball star, and know that he or she spent 10 years shooting a thousand baskets a day.  Or a marathoner running lap after lap around the track in a never-ending circle.  You can know at an intellectual level that they got defeated a hundred times, lost championships, friends, and partners.  They sacrificed their free time, their fun, and their high school years.

They were up at 5AM, when everyone else was up to 3AM partying.  You can know the challenges they have faced, but until you have been there, getting up at 5, shooting baskets all day and watching your friends with their partners having a great time.  When you lose those games, and know down to your core that your best just wasn’t good enough.  When even the next day after a loss, and you get up at 5AM again, wondering if what you are doing is the right thing at all in the lonely hours of the morning.

It’s not until you walk the path, can you truly understand the challenges that lay on it.  The accolades that come after, are not made in the moment, they are made in the years of heartache, sacrifice, and overcoming challenges in the dark.  When no one was around to cheer.

When you finally decide to do, you often won’t know where to start.  My suggestion: eat the frog.  Now that is a statement designed to be unappealing, because that’s exactly where you should start.  Doing the one thing that you don’t want to do.  The one thing you would procrastinate about. The one thing you are putting off.  That is the thing you should start with first.

If you start there, do that thing, it serves two purposes: 1. It shows you that if you’re committed to this thing you are doing, you’ll even do what you don’t want to do to get there, and 2. You were able to do that thing you didn’t want to do.  By doing that, you take one step closer to your goal, and you have started building momentum that eventually will make you unstoppable.

When you start on your journey of doing, it will seem like an impossible task.  It will seem like you have a mountain to climb, an ocean to swim, or a dessert to cross.  It will appear like you have to eat an elephant.  So you simply have to resolve yourself onto that task.  And how do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time.  It will take a while, and there is going to be some tough going, but eventually, especially if you are hungry enough, you’ll get through it.

Now you might be saying to yourself, I do stuff all the time.  I get up, go to work, do what has to be done, and make what I make and am able to live the life I want to live.  You are absolutely right, but ask yourself, are you being proactive, or are you being reactive?  Are you living a life by design, where what you are doing today is moving you forward to your goals?

By all those things you’re doing, you’re showing yourself that you are on the path to your most ideal future.  If you aren’t doing those things for yourself, but you’re doing them for someone else, are you making your dreams come true, or someone else’s?  If you aren’t on the right path right now, that’s OK.  Everyone has to start from somewhere, so you might as well start where you are, and do what needs to be done to get on the path you want to be on.  The way to do that is to be proactive, not reactive, on your journey.  Just being there is often enough, but on the path to making your dreams come true, you have to do.

One of the traps you have to avoid if at all possible is the trap of not deciding, because choosing not to decide is a decision.  It is possible to float through life, to give into all the demands on you and your time, all the unfair things that have happened to you, and just go with the flow.  To be passive, and just let come what may.  If that’s what works for you, that is your choice, but I know you know deep down that that is a choice.  By being passive, you are choosing to let someone else define your future.

If you decide that only reacting to life is not for you, and that you choose to do something more, something greater, in your journey, then never, ever quit.  You can change where you are going.  You can re-evaluate your goals.  You can become more than you thought possible, and what you think is possible from where you’re standing today, may change over time as the view from where you are tomorrow shows you what’s now possible.

Your dreams of today, might be the realities of tomorrow.  And the view is very different from that reality, and your new dreams may be beyond your wildest dreams of yesterday.  But don’t give up on your dreams.  Even if you never reach them, never achieve them, never have a chance of getting to where you want to go, never ever quit.  You will inspire someone around you, someone in your circle to do greater things.

By being that inspiration, you provide the opportunity for them to achieve their dreams.  And that is something worth doing.  While you may be tempted to quit, ask yourself a simple question: If it was impossible to fail, what would I do today to make that dream come true?  And then just do that thing.  Who knows, it might just be possible.

Once you start on the path of doing, you will discover there are a lot of things to do, and it’s hard to choose what one thing, or the next thing, you should do to move you on your journey.  There is a simple framework that I use called the Johari window, and all it does is bucket things into four buckets.  When you are considering a task, ask yourself relative to your goal if this thing you’re going to do is:

Important, or not important?  Is it urgent, or not urgent?

This creates one of four possible answers.  That thing could be:

Now take all of your tasks, and put them into one of these four buckets.  When you’ve done that, let’s start with the most obvious of things: if it’s not important, don’t bother doing it.

That can be a little jarring, and counter-intuitive.  You’re probably saying to yourself ‘I’ve spent the time to think of these things, I can’t just discard them.’ but that’s exactly what you have to do.  By definition, if it’s not important, it’s not important.  Now given that approach, you may rethink a couple of things, and they may move up into the important category, but be careful about reclassification.  It may not be worth the time.

The next step is to focus on what’s important and urgent, but the goal is to move everything eventually into you spending the time on the important, and not urgent side of things.  You want to be spending all your time there eventually. 

You certainly won’t start there, and the hardest things to avoid will be the not important, but urgent things.  Those are the shiny objects that will be tempting and distracting, but if they aren’t contributing to your future, they are taking it away from you.

So spend your time, invest your time, just spend it on the right things that will get you where you want to go.  This way when you do, you will do wisely.