Take Action? Screw You!

Great Post !

I think the "take action" applies to when you already know what to do and procrastinate the action. Then "take action" will make perfect sense.

If someone don't konw what action to take, then "take action" to learn what action to take. It's still require someone getting off their butt and do whatever they needed to.

It is much better to take so sort of action instead of just "Thinking" all the time.

When I'm putting things off, I tell myself " Do It Now", and I repeat the phrase until have the strength to do the work. Hope that could help someone.

Well people have got to know what is a good action to take, I don't think anyone would be telling people to do things just for the sake of doing them

I think that "take action" is just a simple way of saying you have to do something or do something differently, not a order. I've heard it before and never felt like it was an order. It's just an over used catch phrase is all.

I enjoyed your post because it was very similiar to some programs I was a part of in the past. You would go on the calls and they would say "now get out there and make it happen!" which is about the same thing as "take action" only thing was I had no idea what that meant so after spending more money than I could afford I learned that in order to "get out there and make it happen" I needed to know how to do that.

Great thing about taking a step back from it all and reflecting on your experiences is you start to see things for the way they are and the way they can be.

Excellent Post!

Yes you must direct someone more than just saying TAKE ACTION. Help that person out more by giving them specifics as to what to take action upon

The title caught my attention because this is a standard beef of mine.

Take action is necessary, but just saying that is so incomplete it's painful. It needs a solid context to be useful and most people who say, "You must take action," do not provide that context. Mostly, they just give you their method. Ironically, that makes their command easy to blow off and useful for procrastinators. (I speak from experience.)



The Chinese say that the longest journey starts with a single step. I add that the longest journey to nowhere also starts with a single step.

So it's a good idea to know where you are going as the other half of "take action." And this is not just the tactics given in most reports and methods. This means the big picture in your life.

The big picture is the context. If you have that, then "take action" makes a lot of sense as encouragement.

Without the big picture, those words fall on your ears more like a command to spin your wheels.

Michael

I hate the take action mantra.

Although I now have a better understanding of why it works.

Trial and error outperforms planning.

I get your point, Orator, I do, but I think you're also missing an important one yourself, if I may be so bold!

I've always interpreted the "take action" imperative to mean, "have the courage to follow your convictions/dreams/intuition" ... whatever you want to call it. The instruction is intended, I think, to provoke the reader into ending procrastination - a sentiment I'd heartily agree with.

Life is too short to ponder over every detail. I read a great report by Jason Fladlien a while ago in which he described his "60 second rule" (forgive me Jason if I've misquoted you - this is from memory). His basic premise was, make a decision within sixty seconds.

That's probably not sound advice when it comes to, say, marriage or which course to pick for University, but it works a treat on whether to try out a new headline, buy a WSO, keep or discard some "junk" mail, create a new product etc.

I like the "take action" culture - and I totally respect that you had the guts to come out and say what your view of it is. (Or maybe was, by now!)

Thanks for a thought-provoking post.

Trevor.

Interesting subject. I believe to take action you need to know where you are going, but if you know where you going sometimes the take action refers at, do something give that first step (of course you need to know what the step is or else teh step will be to research and plan).

Another interpretation is : once you take the first step, or take action then the universe will present you with different opportunities, things will start falling into place. But you need to be commited to your actions then things will work out. The UNiverse or God will help you out. but if you do not do anything, noone will do things for you.

Well, frankly, it can be good advice for some. A lot of people already have the knowledge if they would just apply it with consistent and steady action for a month, they would see great results. Sadly, people give up way too easily or try something even just for a few hours and then say it doesn't work and move on to something else. I know, because I've been that guy!

So, for people like this, "take action" can be good advice, but I agree it is kind of vague advice and in the end you need a lot more than those two words. It has become kind of a annoying mantra around here as it doesn't fit every situation.

Take action is just the next step in series of steps. You can't just walk up to someone and say "take action". There has to be some precursor to it. Say you've walked someone through the steps of a successful marketing campaign. Take action would then mean it was time to implement it. Without something leading up to the "take action", it's nothing more than a phrase that means nothing really.

This is a valid point.

I do feel taking action is important though,for your skill set is never developed until you take action for a significant amount of time. Too many sit on the sidelines and even though the generic TA phrase might be agitating it does ring true.

Thanks for sharing your insight.

RB

If you have an idea that has been lingering in your mind for some time. Write a plan on how to execute it. And the next step is obvious isn't it? Execute your plan. Thats taking action

I was not going to post on this again, but something kept nagging at me. I finally discovered what it was when I bumped into Maslow's 4 stages of learning once again just now. They are particularly applicable to taking action. For those who don't know, here they are.

Maslow's 4 stages of learning

1. Unconscious incompetence
2. Conscious incompetence
3. Conscious competence
4. Unconscious competence

To take some liberties with the standard descriptions, here is how these stages work for taking action:

1. Unconscious incompetence - We don't know what to do and we don't know how to do any of the actions of a specific method.

2. Conscious incompetence - We know what to do, but we don't know how to do it--or it's really hard to do, requires a lot of focus, and we will still probably screw it up. And we know it.

3. Conscious competence - We know what to do and we know how to do it, but we need to make an effort to concentrate to get it right.

4. Unconscious competence - We not only know what to do, we can do it in our sleep. We usually do it without even thinking about it.

So why should anyone want to take action after reading a method? Obviously to make money or whatever, but that's a better question than appears. What does a person expect to gain with an action? Download cash to his hard disk? That's not real, but I bet you that's close to what's in the mind of a lot of newbies.

If you look at the categories, what can be gained from an action will depend greatly on what the person can do, not just on what he/she wants to do.

I believe the first action people should take on going through any new method should be to evaluate themselves according to these learning categories. Then they can decide what they can and should do.

Here are some actions I see that are appropriate:

1. Unconscious incompetence - Believe it or not, some people breeze through methods and still don't have a clue about a lot of basic stuff. These people will gain the most at this stage by repeating the method or studying more. If they try to implement what they just saw, they will flop miserably. and that will cause many to give up. They still need to learn what they need to do and maybe why they need to do it.

2. Conscious incompetence - This will be most people after going through a new method.

I strongly believe that play should be involved at this stage. Maybe not 100% play, but a good part. These people need to get comfortable with programs, sites, writing texts, planning videos, recording or whatever the method they went through requires. More often than not (especially for newbies), they have not worked before with many of the resources in a method.

Just because they learned about what to do from a method and saw some instructions, that doesn't mean they can do it when they want to. The action they need to do is literally screw up--and screw up some more--for each skill they need until they start getting those skills down.

It's a lot easier to accept screwing up if you are playing than if you are doing something for real. Who likes to look foolish? But part of the actions should be doing stuff for real, too. After all, who doesn't like money? And there's a little secret almost nobody says. People respect doers more than talkers, even when the doers screw up. Just by doing something, you automatically get some respect. If all you do is screw up, though... that's another matter. So play is important until you get a handle on things.

After the screwing up starts going away, another main action a person needs to do at this stage is to repeat and repeat and repeat. This goes for each skill. Sometimes this is called practice. The only way to make something become easy to to repeat it. I wish there were another way, but there isn't.

3. Conscious competence - For people at this level, it's a no-brainer and, I believe, not much of a problem unless the person is lazy. The action here is to get the material up and make money. Another action that would gain this person a lot is focused practice on the skills that are still not second nature.

4. Unconscious competence - Obviously, action at this stage is already routine. You just do it, whatever it is.

From the learning-to-doing angle, when someone says, "What I just presented to you will not do you any good unless you take action--YOU MUST TAKE ACTION!!!" I believe this should be qualified and/or elaborated on by something like the above. Maybe some suggested practice steps for the first couple of categories. And maybe some games or play.

I don't believe in encouraging a totally incompetent person to push a button and get it done when all he is going to do--all he can do at that moment--is run into a brick wall if he tries.

I think this is the part that irritates me when I hear the phrase "you must take action" tossed out as a magic solution to making it all work. It's not the call to take action that's wrong. It's the oversimplified call to take action.

You don't tell someone on the edge of a cliff that he must take action if he doesn't even know he's near one. If he takes the wrong action, it's all over.

Michael

I have to agree somewhat that the "Take Action" thing has become cliche'd.
It is also a very vague statement that, unless there is some type of direction
that is placed next to it, will leave a person floundering about.

If a person is motivated, the telling them to "Take Action" should not be necessary.
If a person spends money to learn something (i.e. internet marketing), and then just
sits around and does nothing, then they really did not want to do the thing in the first place, and telling them to do something (take action) is a waste of time anyway.

"Lights, camera, action" - "It's a take!"

Really good post. Action is needed for anything to materialize, and without it, you just have a bunch of thoughts and plans. Action is the underlining answer in any achievement. Get it? Now go get it!

Because Action makes Inspiration, and people have to be yelled sometime to take action instead of procrastinating about it.

Paul,

I like your video. You present well, too. (I'm an American, so I found your accent charming.)

I also like your idea of making new knowledge sticky in your mind by teaching it immediately after learning it. I've done this a lot, but not ever as a purposeful technique for easier learning.

I do have one caveat about your formulation, though. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it gives you unconscious competence as if it were some kind of shortcut. I used to be a professional classical musician and I needed long hours of practice to gain my unconscious competence. Granted, teaching did help with my own learning, but I also needed all those hours of focused practice and performance.

If you take a look at Internet marketers who pop up one site after another--and promote them--and have been doing so for years, I have no doubt their minds run on autopilot much of the time. But I bet this was not so during their first year or years.

Malcolm Gladwell (in Outliers) mentioned that you need about 10,000 hours of focused action before you become world-class great at something. I imagine unconscious competence comes only from about a hundred hours or so, not from all 10,000, but I'm only guessing. It really depends on the complexity of the skill you want to automate in your mind.

Back to your idea of teaching immediately after learning, you might have a good little product here if you elaborate on it a bit. You could go through a simple money-making system to work on so your clients would see some cash at the end--which is always a good motivator.

For example, make an imaginary simple 2-3 product blog with, say, 3 traffic sources as the target structure to focus on getting done. (Obviously, the student could expand on it later if he/she wishes.) Then here are some of the skills you could walk newbies through, but also showing them how to teach this to others--say with a second blog or a Facebook account or something where they post their own lessons (say, to an imaginary student) as they go along:

How to choose a niche.
How to choose products (and maybe Adsense).
How to choose keywords and how to use them.
How to set up a blog.
How to place advertisements and affiliate links within the content.
Traffic source 1 (maybe article marketing)
Traffic source 2 (maybe SEO)
Traffic source 3 (maybe social networking)

If you do something like this, sell it as a magic bullet (to help get it sold) and include a magic bullet of some sort at the beginning (to fulfill the promise), but follow it up with this learning stuff the newbie really needs, I suspect it would go over well. I'm basing my judgment more on common sense than anything else. It's just a good idea and I believe success starts with good ideas.

Choosing such a magic bullet is tricky if it is wrong, but this is easy to get right. Obviously, a newbie would not have the competence to make the magic bullet work immediately--that goes for all magic bullets, but you could make it so he would be able to use it once he gained the competence that you end up teaching him. Keeping to that standard keeps it honest, sot it's win-win all around.

BUT YOU MUST TAKE ACTION!!!



Michael

PS - I wrote this thinking out loud, but, on reflection, I like the idea so much I might do something similar myself.

You make a very good point. I often tell people to take action on something specific, such as what I just emailed to them or what they just learned.

I think I'm going to reword my emails now. I'm going to say take what you read and make an action plan, not "take action".

So, if I email my list about how to do ad swaps, which I do quite often. Now I'll say, ok, make a plan like this...

Day 1 - buy autoresponder
Day 2 - set up squeeze page
Day 3 - write report/video/ecourse to give away at squeeze page
Day 4 - create or buy PLR for the OTO
Day 5 - create a traffic plan to start getting traffic to squeeze page

That is much more clear than take action. So people really should say - "create and action plan and work through it until you have finished it"

I think it's time to stop browsing and writing ranting posts on the forum and start taking some action.

Will I would like to break it down like how my business professor did to me. She said sonny its very simple. Its 20% thinking of the idea, 30% of planning the idea out, and 50% performing actions so the idea can come to life.

Hope that could help some one as it did for me.

Planning of course. Consistency as for taking action. Do a little something every day and look back at the accomplishments you made after just a week and you'll be surprised!

Bernard

Ya, the whole "take action" does get old but seriously, for newcomers who are in the learning stages, taking action is important. So many times I think people just get consumed with reading these forums that they don't spend 8 hours doing the chores to make things happen.

I think the term 'take action' needs to be an individual thing. For example, if you want to be a pro tennis player, and you have never picked up a tennis racket, I will tell you to 'take action', and don't just wish that one day you will be a pro tennis player.

The action you need to take at this point is not going onto the court and hitting a ball, but rather it will be deciding a timeline, hiring a tennis coach, learning the rules of tennis, etc. All this before you even pick up a racket. This is action, but isn't practicing tennis, or entering tournaments.

The point is, 'take action' may mean something as simple as figuring out what you need to do in order to reach your goal.

The OP says that 'take action' is too vague, but if I am telling you to take action, it may mean that I have no idea what you already know. It is up to you to decide what to work on, and again, action may be getting to the point where you have 'steps' to work on, i.e. deciding on a business model.

I used to get ticked when I heard people say 'take action' and you will succeed, but now I understand. Maybe the reason you don't know what action you need to take and it is too vague, is because you aren't sure what you really want, and you are looking for someone to decide your business model for you.

If you know what you want, and know where you are now, the action to take is the actions that will get you what you want. Don't know what those actions are, hmmmm, well then your first 'take action' assignment, is to find out what actions you want to take to reach your goal.

I know this still sounds vague, but lets say that your goal is to make $50/day. There are about 1,000 different ways to reach that goal, and information on every one of them. Pick one, stick to it, evaluate progress, make adjustments as needed.

1. Decide what you want
2. Choose a plan to get what you want - one that you feel you can execute.
3. Start doing the steps required of the plan
4. Evaluate
5. Make Adjustments
6. Reach your goal, and set a new one.

Flame me if you want to - this is just my opinion.

Orator brings up a very good point and has obviously stirred up a good discussion on the whole topic of "taking action." I agree that the "Why" behind doing something is and always has been more important than the "what" or "how." My frustration with a lot of the "take action" evangelists is that they pump us up with a huge "why" but end up leaving us a bit bewildered or overwhelmed when it comes to the "whats" and "hows."

On the other hand, I think there are too many "professional students" who are caught up in a cycle of "learning" without ever getting around to the "doing."

In the end, you need to take action on what you're learning or you're just going to stay where you are. It's a decision that everyone needs to make for themselves. Having a coach or a mentor is incredibly helpful, but they can't (and shouldn't) do the work for you. That part is up to you.

Good conversation on an important topic. Thanks for the post!

Tim

In the end, the "why" needs to come from the individual. And it needs to be a big "WHY". You need a reason to get up every day, night, weekend, whenever you can to make progress.

Going back to the original post though, something struck me. The mantra of "take action" is an important one and a signal to newbies to do more than just read blogs and purchase WSOs without actually following through and doing something with what they've learned. If you're asking "why" when someone says "take action", you need to go back to the drawing board and figure out why you're here (i.e. WF) in the first place.

"Take action" can be so many thing... It literally means "do something" "Don't just sit on your butt dreaming". Now when we talk about IM, most of the people starting out will purchase multiple ebooks and courses without taking any action whatsoever. What they need to do now is to take action.

"taking action" is the most important thing in IM, and it's one of the main reasons why most people fail, simple logic. You can learn all you want from ebooks and videos, but you can only truly learn when you take action. You reap what you sow. When you put in the effort, then can you earn something back.

But due to it's importance, the phrase has become so overused now that it doesn't really have much effect on most people.

I came across this quote a few months ago, and I think it really really encapsulates the whole concept:

What it means to me is that in almost every case, doing anything is better than doing nothing. When you do nothing, there is no possibility. But with activity comes the possibility of accomplishment. Even if the activity is seemingly random, un-related or counter intuitive.

Granted, I think for most of us, when we "take action" can do so with a good idea of just what action makes the most sense - instead of doing something randomly, but even random action has the possibility that inaction lacks.

While I definitely agree that the simple instruction to "take action" is not quite inspiring - it is good advice for those who listen, and do.

The biggest problem I see on this forum is people trying to get information non stop. They ask all these questions, spend hours and hours on reading, but they aren't taking action. Meaning, they are putting the knowledge to use. Taking action, is making things happen. Don't be passive about it.

Because Action creates Inspiration, Don't wait for Inspiration to take action. Think Less Do more and just love what you do.

i think taking actions is far better than sitting in a couch waiting for things to happen

Take action depending on the conversation can mean many different things to many different people,hearing the phrase take action could be sometimes just what the dr. ordered,there is no right or wrong answer its all in how you take it and what it means to you

Angie,

I just saw this.

I'm glad you got value from my post and I appreciate your kind words.

I've been doing a lot of thinking recently about learning. Maslow is definitely one of the giants whose shoulders we all need to stand on.

Michael