Information Is Cheap, Action Is Expensive

Remember how understandable it was to be late 20 years ago? It wasn’t like the world will collapse if you’re late 5 minutes. There were no cell phones. If we had to meet you, and you were late, we first assumed that you simply forgot. After more than 15 minutes, we simply decided that you didn’t want to meet us anymore and think of a way to solve this next time we meet. And then went on with our lives.

20 years ago, if you wanted to go from point A to point B, you had to rely much more on action, than on information. Action meant to just start and see how you’re doing later on. Get on that train and figure it out while you’re on it. Get on a bus and negotiate your arrival later. Just be out there somehow. Action was the cheapest merchandise out there. Everybody has it and used it.

Information, on the other side, was very expensive. To know a lot of stuff was a ridiculously difficult task. Most of the time, information was confined within thick walls, like libraries or laboratories. And if it wasn’t that, it was distance. It was very difficult for you to visually experience a tea ceremony, for instance. Because the information had a very slow propagation speed. There was no internet. Only TV, printed papers and books. All very, very slow in spreading information.

Now, things are completely different.We know everything we need to know about point B, but we’re unable to foster the necessary resources to get there. Information is no longer confined within thick walls, we can learn everything we want about everything we can imagine. Yet, we almost never get on a bus, ready to negotiate our arrival later on. In a strange and almost imperceptible way, action became prohibitive to us. Information is everywhere, but the ability to act on it it’s almost a dream. It’s all backwards now. Information is extremely accessible, while action seems to became the most expensive merchandise in the world. We seldom take real action on what we want. We spend our lives processing and consuming incredibly high amounts of information, but we almost never take action on what we know.

For instance, it’s very easy to spot an opportunity business now. You have the internet and most of the time, all you have to do to get some information is to google it. You can verify if somebody else already implemented your ideas in minutes. 20 years ago this was basically impossible. We have lower risk barriers now. Yet, we don’t take the necessary action to actually make it happen.

I experienced this on a few levels, but the most visible is by far the business level. I meet very often with young entrepreneurs, and they’re telling me their brilliant ideas. Some of them even have presentation skills. Some of the even have enthusiasm. But almost none of them has the guts to actually implement that idea. Most of the time, they mask their inability to take action behind the “we need seed money” excuse. But even if they get seed money, they don’t have the necessary internal resources to make the best out of their business idea.

The incessant race towards more and more information drastically affected our ability to act. And if I would be a tabloid journalist, I would write now a very strong sentence about the end of the world. Luckily, I’m not a tabloid journalist, so I would write this: it’s an incredible opportunity, folks! While others are spending their lives watching that twitter stream, you can start a real life conversation with a potential business partner. Just go ahead and do it! It won’t cost you more time or resources than any of those dozens if meaningless – yet incredibly rewarding from a psychological point of view – interactions on Facebook you have anyway. Instead of reading blogs (including this one) just go ahead and DO something with your life. Your action doesn’t need to be perfect. On the contrary, even if you screw things up, you may end up in a much better position than those who are not even screwing their life up.

From an economical point of view, the value of information is constantly degrading. Not only it gets cheaper to be consumed, but it also gets cheaper and cheaper to be produced. On the other side, the value of action is keep getting higher and higher. The less you find a needed product on the market, the higher its price. Action, any action you may be able to create, it’s now more rewarding than information.

There is only one exception to this rule, and that is this very article. The information you got from it it’s very precious. Now go out there and DO something about it!

Dream Big, Act Bigger

This is a guest post by Maren Donovan, @marenkate.

The famous words “I have a dream” have been used countless times to encourage, motivate and move people. What many never consider though is what if no one had ever acted on Dr. King’s dream? Without action dreams are just that, dreams, they come to you in a flash and dissipate with the morning light. Instead of focusing on ‘living your dreams’ I like to focus on ‘acting out my dreams’ this is far more effective and what 99% of dreamers will never grasp.

6 Steps To Dreaming Big And Acting Even Bigger

1. What can’t be quantified can’t be qualified. This is nerd speak for regardless of your dreams if you don’t set up so type of ‘plan’ on how to execute them they will never become a reality. Think of it like this, if your child comes to you and says “Daddy I want to be a doctor” what would the steps be for them to reach that goal by age 30? No one in their right mind would imagine a parent responding “ok, well just sit there and in 20 years I am sure it’ll happen”. So why do people approach goals and dreams that way?

Instead of laying down a strategic plan people would prefer to complain, sigh and make excuses on why they’ll ‘never lose weight’, ‘never meet the man of their dreams’ or ‘never get out of this dead end job’. It is as simple as setting your goals up, on paper and then tracking the simple steps that will get you there. The smaller the steps the better, this makes it easier to follow through with. Then as you hit each little goal you cross it off and feel the warmth of accomplishment wash over them. Hopefully after months of training your mind to both qualify and quantify you’ll become an action taker who always looks for the steps to a goal instead of just desiring that goal to happen organically.

2. Learning baby steps. The follow up to the last step would be breaking down goals into bite sized pieces that you can over all ‘act on’ instead of just think about. Here is a real life example of the baby steps I set for myself to escape the 9 to 5 and be able to live life on my own terms through having entrepreneurial income streams:

1. Figure out my passion: I wrote down a list of things I loved doing and then did research on which would be most profitable, had a decent market size and which niches within I could dominate.
2. Build a basic blog to document my progress: This is where my blog Escapingthe9to5.com came into play, more than a way for me to express myself it was a means to ‘quantify’ my progress and it gave me the added incentive of not embarrassing myself by failing in front of the few readers I had at the time.
3. Decide on a product/service to sell
4. Setting up monetary goals for 3 weeks, 3 months, 6 months and a years time.
5. Celebrate EACH little achievement. It helps you have something to look forward to and encourages you to keep going towards acting out your dreams.

3. Dreams aren’t realistic, why should your goals be? If there is a will there is a way, this sentiment is something my Mom has always told me and it is 100% true. Whatever you dream for your life, sans like becoming a Unicorn, you have as much of a chance as you give yourself to achieve. Literally the world is full of stories of the most unlikely candidates overcoming ridiculous odds to succeed and live a fabulous life. What obstacles do you face? I doubt they are that big when you look at the sufferings of the rest of the world, so in reality you have it easy… and you shouldn’t waste your chance. So go for broke, make ridiculous goals, say you’ll have a house in Bora Bora and you’ll find the cure for cancer. The only thing holding you back is the actions to get to the point of fulfilling that dream, so if you map out the actions you CAN achieve the dream.

4. Actions generate response exponentially. I have noticed a crazy trend as I take more and more actions in my life to create the kind of destiny I want. The more I act the easier the actions get and the more productive they seem to be. So it would seem that actions multiply and compound the more you practice doing vs. just thinking about it.

5. Failure is still action. Is it better to have loved and lost? I don’t know, but I do know that it is much better to have acted and failed than to never have acted at all. I have failed at things a good number of times in my young life and some people would say that if I hadn’t taken so many leaps I wouldn’t have failed so much, this is true, but I also wouldn’t have succeeded ever, at all. Failure only makes the success at the end of the road that much sweeter!

6. Always bite off more than you can chew. This flies in the face of logic and goes against every authority figure I have ever had, but it is 100% true in my book. Every great success I’ve had comes after I got in over my head or bit off more than I could chew. The reason behind jumping off the deep end is simple, when you HAVE to make it work 9 times out of 10 you will. It is just how the world works. The problem is all too often people never try and go in over their head because they’ve heard a million warnings on how that is a bad idea, not realizing that all success – at some level – has been born out of taking a plunge into uncharted waters… just look at Columbus.

Hopefully this has inspired you to take a look at your life and really go grab whatever it is you want the most by the horns. There is a great quote by the author of The Magic of Thinking Big that simply states it how it is: Action cures fear.

Author Bio: Maren Donovan writes at Escapingthe9to5.com about entrepreneurship, motivation and, of course, escaping the 9 to 5 race. You can subscribe to her blog here.

The Simple Motivational Guide to Take Action

This is a guest post from Oscar Del Ben, an up and coming personal development blogger. In this post he’s going to give us a simple motivational guide to take action. Enjoy!

So you’ve figured out what you want to do, you’ve seen other succeed before and you want do the same.

Now you need to take action, but you probably also need to gain some motivation first.

Let’s be honest, without doing something, you’ll hardly get what you want in life. The feeling of stuck that you experience when you are starting out is normal, and every successful people has come through it in the beginning.

Fortunately, once you learn how to deal with that feeling, things will start to get done, and the results will come. It’s like moving a giant ball, it’s hard in the beginning, but it gets easier and easier as you get going.

So are you ready to learn how to be motivated and start to get things done?
Here’s how to do it.

1. Make a plan. Start from where you are now, and write down the steps you’ll need to take to reach your dream. Don’t worry about creating the perfect plan, you’ll adjust it along the way. Some people prefer to do this step the other way around, by starting at the end and moving backwards until where they are now, that’s fine too. If you have trouble thinking at what should be your next step, write down the thing that you think would be more likely to push you closer to your goal.
2. Reinforce your thoughts. Repeating motivational quotes is a powerful tool to develop your do habit. I usually repeat a few phrases in the morning, or when I get stuck. I’ve found that once you find a quote that makes sense to you, it’s hard to not move accordingly. Some of my preferred ones are: If you try, then there’s a change it might work. If you don’t, then it’s guaranteed it won’t work - We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit.- Am I inventing things to avoid the important?
3. Commit publicly. An easy way to get a boost of motivation is to commit your goals publicly. For example when I started my pushups challenge I knew it was going to be hard for me, so I announced it on my blog. When you show people that you do what you say no matter what happens, you’ll gain respect and trust. You can either commit on your blog, or with your family and friends.
4. Just get started. Don’t focus on the whole task from the beginning. Take the first step and motivation will come. Leo teaches us this concept very well. I’ve learned from him that when I have to go out for a morning run, I just have to put my running shoes and get outside of the door, by that time I’ll be already highly motivated to do the rest. This is true for virtually every other task or activity, as it’s easier for your brain to focus on a little thing and then get going.
5. Adjust along the way. It has been said that the best way to learn something is by doing it, and it’s true. No matter how hard you worked in your initial plan, unexpected events will happen, and you’ll have to adjust your plan accordingly. You’d be surprised by how many businesses start with an initial idea and then make a fortune in a very different area.
6. Do less. Don’t get trapped by working too much. The goal is to eventually do less. You have already heard of the 80/20 rule, now it’s time to apply it to your business. Get rid of unimportant tasks and focus on what truly matters. Remember that doing something unimportant well does not make it important, and being busy is a form of laziness. Learn from your experiences and do more of what provides the greatest results.

Sometimes it’s easy to procrastinate and forget that doing stuff is what truly matters. Don’t let that happen to you. Start today working on your dreams, you only need to take one step at a time.

Life reserves awesome things for those who are willing to create something, so create.

Author bio: Oscar Del Ben writes about Personal Development, Productivity and Life at FreestyleMind.com.
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How to Overcome Frustration in 3 Easy Steps

“Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion . . .  I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.” – Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I used to totally, utterly, absolutely, downright hate frustration. It was an emotional reaction, I just couldn’t help it. Whenever I got caught in its the subtle yet powerful chains I felt like crap. I think you know the feeling. Hands tied up, no possible solution to the current situation and a lot of mess to deal with. Yes, frustration can do that to you.

Being so keen on doing things, starting new projects all the time, entering new challenges almost daily, it was absolutely natural to face a lot of frustration. It was the expected behavior. Only I thought it wasn’t. I thought I didn’t deserve it. Why this is happening to me? Took me a long time to understand, but it really worth the wait.

Be a Friend of Frustration

The good news is that you can overcome frustration. I’m not talking about avoidance here, because, believe it or not, frustration is a key ingredient in your personal development, but rather about a friendship strategy. An alliance with frustration, an armistice. As any other emotional response, frustration leverages huge amounts of energy. And you can use that energy. In fact, it’s such a shame to let it slip away.

Step 1: Acknowledge the Problem

Accept it. Yes, you are frustrated. It’s already happened, can’t bring time back. You’re here and you’re frustrated. You’re not sad, angry or apathetic. You’re frustrated. Write it down on a piece of paper. Find a mirror (preferably in an isolated place) and say to you: “I’m looking at me and I’m frustrated”. Find a good friend, call him and say to him: “Buddy, I’m frustrated”.

This requires a little bit of courage and a little bit of exercise. You need courage to accept it, because frustration is often associated with being powerless. To some extent, you are powerless when you’re frustrated. You really lost your power over the specific events you were trying to control. But only on those events, not over your entire life. You still have enough power to move on. Yes, you lost power over what you’re trying to do, accept that.

Acknowledging the problem will stop your current flow of actions. Maybe you’re doing the same thing for weeks months or years, without any positive results. Acknowledging that you’re frustrated about that will stop you. And that’s a good thing. It’s good to stop when you’re doing stupid things.

Step 2: Change the Status Quo

Now that you know you’re frustrated, start working on the status quo. Start changing the current environment. Somehow. Accepting your frustration already did half of the job: it stopped your current flow of actions. You’re not doing stupid things anymore. That’s good. But that’s not enough. You have to move forward.

Changing the status quo involves reversing part of the actions you’ve done so far. If it’s possible. If there are persons involved, you can start by apologizing to them. If there are broken things, you can start fixing them. If there are damages, you can start covering the loss. Somehow.

Changing the status quo also means acting. Just do things again. Frustration is like a snake venom: paralyzes you, makes your muscles useless and you can’t speak anymore. Reverse that. Start moving around. Stretch your legs, start babbling even if you’re pathetic. Being pathetic means you’re no longer frustrated, you’re just pathetic.

Acting after accepting your situation will reorganize the odds around you. The mere fact of moving in a new direction will bring in some luck. Sometimes enough to put you on the right track again, sometimes much more than you can even imagine. I know for sure that some of my bigger breakthroughs were born out of some of my bigger frustrations.

Step 3: Enjoy your New Level

After you started to act on your status quo, your environment will look better. Sometimes you can completely reverse the situation which causes frustration, sometimes you’re just ameliorating things. Whatever the case, you’re out of the dead hole. You’re on a new track, trying something new. Stay there.

And, above all, enjoy it. There is this popular habit of mild sorrow after you overcome a huge obstacle. Man, it’s good to be here, but before wasn’t so bad after all. Don’t do this to you. Just fully enjoy your new level and leave the past tot the past.

Frustration is not a dead hole, unless you want to make a dead hole out of it. It’s an elevator, a way to quickly reach to a new level. You could take the stairs, of course, and have a leaner course to the top. But if you want to reach there faster, you’ll need more energy. A lot more energy. You’re going to make leaps instead of going step by step.

And what you call frustration, is in fact the manifestation of an elevator right at your fingertips. You asked for it, because you wanted to reach out faster, now you have it. Don’t reject it, don’t misuse it. An elevator can take you in a few seconds to the top of the world, or it could take you to the basement. Be careful what buttons you push.

After all, it’s just an elevator, you’re in command.

Action versus Reaction

Acting is what makes you happy, reacting is what makes you miserable.

Whenever you act, you perform a conscious choice, you decide you’re going to do that thing. You become responsible. But when you react, you follow somebody else’s choice, you’re responding to an external stimulus. You’re not responsible anymore, you leave the responsibility to the stimulus. When you act, you’re the pupeteeer, when you react, you’re the puppet.

Choice versus Context

Acting is independent of the context, reacting is totally dependent of the context.

You may be in favorable contexts at times. When you’re a kid, most of the time you’re in a continuous favorable context. The problem is that context is artificial, you are protected by your parents. While you’re a kid, in a favorable context, acting or reacting are basically the same: whatever you do the context will remain favorable. Your parents will love and protect you no matter what. But once you get out from their protection, you may hit some very unfriendly contexts. And here you’ll learn the real difference between conscious action and powerless reaction.

If you consciously chose success, you don’t really care about context. You’re going to be successful no matter what. You act, you’re consciously building your own way. You chose to get there no matter what. But if you don’t make this choice, and your life is just a reaction to a chaotic flow of stimulus, then anything in the surroundings will help you fail. It’s you who let the context do that, and you did this by resigning from your own command, by reacting instead of acting.

For instance, being miserable after losing your job it’s a reaction. The context was really hard for you and you lost something. The “normal” reaction is to be sad, worried, discouraged and miserable. On the other hand, being confident, manifesting hope and starting to look for another job (or even starting your own business) it’s a conscious choice. Losing your job it’s just a fact. What you do about this fact is what really matters.

Reward And Frustration

Acting is rewarding, reacting is frustrating.

Every time you act on something, you are rewarded in some way. Not every conscious action will be successful. You may fail at times. Maybe many times. But you still get your reward. When you fail, the reward is in learning. You made a choice, you acted in a specific way and you learned something, even if the action was a complete failure.

If you react, all you get is frustration. You didn’t make a choice, you just responded to a stimulus. Maybe you wanted something else, but instead of choosing an action, you automatically reacted to that stimulus. There is no way you can get a reward if you’re reacting to something. Even if the initial stimulus was positive.

For instance, you blindly fall in love with somebody.That’s a positive stimulus and you reacted to it. After the initial, unconscious chemistry phase, you have a choice: to love and accept no matter what. If you don’t consciously chose to love no matter what, you’ll get hurt. Instead of accepting the other one, you’ll start to control him. In love, jealousy is a reaction, unconditional acceptance is a conscious action.

Choosing versus Enduring

The difference between action and reaction is not always simple. Most of the time we’re acting by habit, and habits are just safe reactions. We know how to ride a bike, we learned how to do it, when we’re on the bike, we’re just reacting to it. It’s a safe reaction. Many of our habits are safe reactions. But some of them are just stupid.

Some of the most dangerous safe reactions are related to money. We tend to react to economic stimulus and news, rather then act upon them. For instance, if there’s news about a bad economic context, we’re starting to protect our investments. That’s a safe reaction. The bad economic context may or may not hurt us directly, we never really know that. But the pre-programmed reaction to cover our savings will emerge without any control from our part.

A much better approach would be to directly act upon our finances. For instance, it’s not uncommon that investment is much more profitable during hard economic conditions. A lot of stuff, including real estate, is getting cheaper. Running to protect our money, by reaction, instead of investing it, by conscious action, will be stupid. Again, the economic context it’s a fact, everybody will feel it, what really matters is our attitude towards it, our choices.

Results versus Excuses

Action creates results, reaction creates excuses.

Every time you consciously chose something, you are producing results. You are the one who started everything, hence the reality obeyed you. Again, even if the action was, by any standard, a failure. Reality responded to your stimulus and created a result. Maybe it wasn’t the result you wanted, but it’s still a result.

If you’re reacting to something or somebody else, you are producing excuses. Your reactions to external stimulus will seldom be aligned with your internal values. If you chose to react to stimulus, you’re already giving up your values and empower the stimulus. You’re not acting, you are giving out control.

Most of the time, your reactions will try to protect yourself from apparently bad things: somebody yelling at you, losing your job, being left by your partner. A typical reaction to all of these will be frustration. And perhaps sadness, lack of hope, misery. So, after the yelling is gone, after the job is gone, after the partner is gone and after your miserable reaction, all you will be left with are excuses. It could have been the other way around, but it isn’t. Sorry.

***

A typical reaction after reading this post will be to think a little bit, to identify possible matches with your own behavioral patterns and then to forget it while gazing at the next funny cat picture on the web. A conscious action will be to bookmark it, to share it with as many friends as you can and to comment on it.

I’m joking, of course. But I’m consciously choosing to joke with you by writing this blog post, instead of gazing at the wall in my office and thinking life sucks. And this action will certainly create some great results.

How about you?

Law Of Attraction And Action

Everybody talks about it. Everybody seems to know everything about it and I guess every second there is another post on some blog about The Law Of Attraction. I first heard about it when I saw The Secret, 2 years ago. I was touched by the movie and I was lucky enough to have already seen What The Bleep Do We Know, so I was somehow prepared for more. The movie had quite an impact on me. I do plan to write more about the movie later on, including about what I call the “too-sweet-for-me-layer-of-consumerism” that surrounds the much more difficult to ingest core of the film. But for now I’d like to share some of my opinions about The Law Of Attraction and what makes it really work for you. And that would be: Action.

First of all, The Law Of Attraction wasn’t discovered with The Secret. It was there all the time, only with different names. I guess every major religion had a way to convey this: “as above, so beneath”, “what’s inside is outside”, and so on. So it’s not a major breakthrough of the movie. The major breakthrough of the movie was the fact that was able to communicate it in a very simple way to a massive audience. That was the real hit behind The Secret.

Second, The Law Of Attraction works whether you are aware of it, or not. That’s pretty clear for you when you first understand it and then try to remember your life. It’s like somebody has lit a torch in front of you. It suddenly becomes clear. Your whole life revealed to you in such a simple and logical structure, that you could never use another way to describe it. It always works, whether you are aware of it or not.

What Is The Law Of Attraction?

It’s the fact that everything you think becomes reality. Everything you want becomes reality. Everything you intend becomes reality. It’s the proof that you are of divine essence, being able to create your own universe.

Everything you do, think or intend, has a vibration. Your body has a vibration. Your thoughts are carrying a vibration, and I mean the physical electromagnetic charges that are composing the synapses. Your brain works on 4 different brainwaves, from alertness to sleep. You communicate by using air vibrations called words. Everything around you is vibration, even if the scientific tools are sometimes too obtrusive to measure it, like in thoughts or intentions. (more…)