All of us have million-dollar ideas, probably everyday. Most of us could have built business empires by now, but we haven’t, simply because we fail to act when we come across an idea we should run with. Visit any place, online or offline, and ask yourself, “What if the person behind this had never taken action?” Casey Neistat is a fantastic example of someone who takes action on his creative ideas, the most prominent of which being his daily YouTube vlog. Every time he produces a timelapse of the sunset in New York, where he lives, you feel gratitude for the action he took to bring his imagination to life. Neistat believes that:
“It’s the execution that matters. Never the idea.”
Napoleon Hill and Earl Nightingale encourage the daily writing down of ideas so that when a solid idea comes along, you can act on it–And act you must! The problem with most of us is that we rarely, if ever, take Hill and Nightingale’s advice. We somehow get the idea that things will happen of their own accord, with no effort on our part. In turn, our lack of action causes us to believe that our ideas are no good because, rather than acting on them and really finding out, we end up sitting around, thinking of negative, imaginary scenarios in which our idea fail miserably. We think we have to be great at something before we ever start. However, in the words of Zig Ziglar,
“You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.”
Get started on your idea. Don’t waste time overthinking it. You don’t have to be good at it yet. In fact, as you work on your idea, you’ll start to get to know yourself very well, because action will reveal both your strengths and your weaknesses to you as you progress. This is a fantastic part of the action-taking process that will truly result in you becoming “great.”
“It’s easy to dream about it … Much harder to execute it … Work!”
Gary Vaynerchuk knows and teaches that it is only through hard work that you can reach success. It’s the work we do when nobody’s looking that counts. It’s the countless hours, the late-night meetings, the attention to detail, the risks, the careful planning that can make even the most unoriginal business ideas take flight.
“The path to success is to take massive, determined actions.”
Not only are our ideas worthy of action, but we ourselves are worthy of attaining success. Tony Robbins’s advice to take “massive, determined actions” is the formula for the way we should execute on our ideas. So, start now. What ideas have you been keeping hostage in your mind? Write them down, figure out your first step, and take action!
