How it changed me to focus a year or two on taking good action and persistence
Hello everybody,
I hope you are doing fine. I just woke up and had this thought that I wanted to share with you all. I am curious about what you think about this so tell me after reading this post. Now, let´s jump right into it
Yesterday, I met with a friend and we talked about starting careers after our studies and then we came to the subject of personality tests. I will not talk much about the details but if you want there are plenty of free ones online. The interesting thing we talked about was how accurate those are to describe ourselves. Only some questions and they can predict how you react in certain situations quite well. Additionally, it was interesting that how you react is different for everybody. I mention this because the following can be different for varying personalities but for my personality, this is worth so much. I am quite creative, always full of ideas but pursuing something consistently is difficult for me. Hence, the only thing that makes a difference for me is to decide and pursue it sometime before I allow myself to think about changing direction.
So, this talk made me think about what alteration influenced me the most in the last years. Surprisingly, it was relatively easy for me to identify that focusing on taking good action and being persistent and consistent were the biggest changes for me. And this fits so extremely good to my personality. The tests even pointed out that I should be aware to not get lost in this flood of ideas because the practical implementation of my ideas will be many times difficult for me.
Therefore, I focused, especially, the last two years, more and more on consistently taking good actions and pursuing through difficult times. I am still extremely far from being consistently good at those but I am way better than two years ago! And I remember that I read from Tim Ferriss that it´s okay to be most of the day not effective as long as you make each day time free to be productive. This time can be in the morning, middle of the day or evening. The important part is that you have a block of time free in which you focus on the most crucial tasks. Those tasks are simply the tasks that will move your life the most forward. Or in Tim Ferriss’s words: “Often the most important tasks are the ones that we fear the most, those tasks that we don´t want to do but know that they would improve our life so much.”. I have little notes hanging next to me that remind me of those three parts and they help me many times. For example:
20 % knowing vs 80 % doing
Focus on the process!
Are you creating or consuming?
Those notes help me to remember that it´s not so much about thinking something through but more about taking action. Because, even if you know the most about something, you will only be successful at it if you use it.
For example, if you read for 10 years each day about drawing and you looked at drawings but you never drew. Then, you will not be able to draw really well. But if you instead would´ve done your best to draw just each day a sketch for some minutes. Then, you probably would make extremely good drawings.
I applied this for sure with my blog and I am still doubting myself a lot. Then, I am not sure if this makes any sense. Maybe I bore the shit out of my readers. Maybe I am not improving. Maybe … and so on…
However, the greatest change for me was that I tried my best to read about how to write better. I continued reading books from great authors and I enjoyed it. But additionally, to this, I focused on writing more. I have so many started writings, small ones, longer ones, just notes, etc in different places but I also have quite some finished pieces. Pieces that I think became quite good writings (I hope you agree at least to some of those writings that they are okay ^^).
But I also used taking good action, and persistence and consistency in other areas in the last years. For most of them, I only realized it now thinking back but I really managed to calm the flood of new ideas in my mind in different areas. I did that with my biology study, with sport, with nutrition, and with learning languages and it worked out really well for me. Don´t get me wrong, I was doubting myself many times and for each of those examples I was thinking about giving up quite some times. But I am indescribably happy that I persisted. Not only because I achieved my goals in all of those areas, some better than others, but also because of all the additional experiences I made and the skills, I learned.
So, what I want you to take out of reading this is that you got to draw a line in the sand. Better chose something that you are a little bit sure about that it´s okay for you and try it than focusing too much on the understanding it part. This is probably one of the most valuable things I learned in the last years and I still fail a lot at it. But I became so much better than I have been before. And honestly, that´s the only measurement we all should have. To be better than we were yesterday.
I wish you all the best and enough strength to consistently take good actions and persist through the inevitable struggles,
Alexander
Motivation is the by-product of action. Hence, TAKE MORE ACTION.
Another of my notes