Taking Action

I need to be more about the doing.

This has always been one of the weaknesses in my life.  I am great dreamer.  I am a great one for painting pictures and imagining scenarios and planning.  But I too often fall down in execution.

Why?  A plethora of reasons I suppose.  Execution is not fun.  It is the actual hard work after the hard work of thinking.  A thousand things try to steal your attention away from the task you are currently at.  And it always seems to take much longer to accomplish something that what you envision it would.

But reputations are made on execution. Results are based in execution.  The doing is ultimately what determines the rewards that come in life.

If I looked at my life over the past year and rated it not on what I had thought about or dreamed about but what I actually accomplished, my sense of my life would be greatly changed.  I would have far fewer things to point to as accomplishments - family, professional, personal, spiritual - than I would than to what I had thought about accomplishing during the last year.

What is the solution?  Fairly straightforward of course, as most of the really important things are:  Do.   Understand what it is that I want to accomplish and take some action on them every day.  Begin to incorporate what I have done in to the metrics of my success, not just what I have thought about doing.

Words alone will not accomplish great deeds.  Action is called for.

P.S.  Here is a splendid article by Kirstin  O'Donovan on 4 Ways That You'll Ensure Failure.  It summarizes the concept quite nicely.