7 Steps To Help You Take Massive Action And Achieve Excellent Results In Life
When you take little or no action, you will receive mediocre results. This is the law of the universe, and there isn’t anything that you can do to change it. Even winning the lottery requires you to take action by purchasing the lottery ticket in the first place. If you are unsatisfied with any areas of your life, maybe you are not taking the necessary steps to make things better.
1) Admit This – Knowledge Is Power Isn’t True
If you think knowledge is power, let me tell you it isn’t true. If knowledge is power, why aren’t the richest or most powerful positions in the world held by people who have pHDs and Masters? Knowledge itself isn’t powerful. Knowledge is only useful when it is incorporated with action.
Most people know it, but they don’t get it. Your life is going to stay the same if you are only reading more. You can turn your life around only when you had decided to make use of the acquired knowledge and take action to make things happen.
2) Have An End In Mind ñ Without One You Are Just Wasting Time
Know what you want and this will help to guide you along your journey. It is necessary to take massive action, but it will be useless if you do not know where you want to end up at. You need to keep rowing to move the boat forward. However, you will end up at places you don’t want to be if you don’t know where you are rowing towards.
If you do not know what you truly want to achieve in your life, find out what you are dissatisfied with. It is a good place to start. Be aware of your dissatisfaction in your life and set a goal to turn it around. Make it a goal to lose weight if you are dissatisfied with how you feel and look. Make plans to get out of debt. Find ways to start a business. Just get an end to your mind so you can start to work towards it.
3) Brainstorm For Strategies
You will need strategies if you want to reach your goal. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. You may not have all the answers now, but you need the first set of strategies that you will take to start moving forward. You can improve upon your strategies afterward.
Brainstorm about all the strategies you have in your mind and write them down on a piece of paper. Brain dump everything on the piece of paper and don’t think about how silly the idea is. You are not going to evaluate during the brainstorming period. Evaluation will only hinder the process.
4) Evaluation
You need to find out whether your strategies are feasible and are they the 80/20 tasks that will provide you with major results. For your info, the 80/20 principle is the concept of identifying key tasks (20%) that will produce the greatest results (80%).
The common mistake during the evaluation period is to allow fear to make the decisions. After the brain storm session, most people will cross out many fabulous strategies due to fear. They will start to doubt their capability of carrying out that strategy. Don’t let fear hold you back. Ask yourself this question; “if you can’t fail, will you still do it?” If you do, most likely it will be a key strategy or task that you need to undertake.
Remember to identify the 20% tasks that will produce 80% of the results. Checking email is the 80% task that will produce 20% of the results. Writing an article or creating products are the 20% tasks that will produce 80% of the results for a blogger. You get the idea.
5) Start Moving
It is time to get to work. Your dreams will remain as it is unless you start to take action to turn it into reality. I believe you are going to take the necessary action or else you won’t be reading this article in the first place. Refer back to the strategies that you chose and derive specific action that you must take.
David Allen, the author of bestselling book Getting Things Done, mentioned one excellent idea in the book. If you want to tune your car, tuning your car should not be in your to do list. You can write ‘tune my car’ into your to do list if you are the car mechanic. If you’re not a mechanic, it is a good idea to break the task down into action steps that you can do instead.
This is the thinking process.
Tune my car – Find the name card of my favorite mechanic – Get the number of the garage – Call and schedule the appointment.
ìTune my carî is broken down into specific steps that you need to take in order to get things done. When your tasks are specific, it increases the probability of you doing it. If your to do list is filled with vague tasks, you are making it harder for you to take action. Life is hard enough, make things easier.
If you intend to write “tune my car” in your to do list, what is the next step you are going to take? You do not have a specific step to take in this case. You are making yourself procrastinate when your tasks are vague. It will be a completely different story if you write down ‘find the name card of my favorite mechanic’, followed by ‘get the contact number of the garage’ and lastly ‘call and schedule your appointment’.
Getting specific tasks out on your to do list can help you gain clarity, take action faster and build your momentum to take more massive action.
6) This Is The Secret Weapon You Can Use If You Are Reluctant To Take Action
Let me introduce you this idea, 5 Minutes Room Rescue, proposed by the FlyLady, who is an executive turned into an organization guru. The idea is to set your kitchen timer for 5 minutes. Next, rush to your dirtiest room and clean it up. When the timer buzzes, stop and you can stop with a clear conscience.
This powerful strategy can help you to kick-start yourself into taking massive action. Sometimes when you just don’t feel like doing anything, set a timer for 5 minutes and start doing it. Usually you will end up doing more than 5 minutes. It is hard to stop when you are seeing instant results.
To get you to start is the hardest task. However, it is hard to stop when you get started. This is where momentum will help to make things easier for you.
7) Review And Fine Tune
Taking massive action is terrific, but it won’t matter if it does not produce the results that you want. Make it a habit to do weekly or monthly review. Use numbers to help you track results. If you want to lose weight, track your weight monthly. Record them down on an excel sheet. If you want to start a business, create a time line and review it monthly to see how you are progressing.
The most important question that you need to keep asking yourself is whether are you getting nearer to your goals.
If what you are doing now is not getting you nearer to your goals, fine tune and change your strategies. If you are doing the right things, results will show. This is why tracking numbers and reviewing your progress is crucial. Once you start to see the results, you will be inspired and motivated to take massive action.
Vincent writes at HealthMoneySuccess, a personal development blog that teaches you how to change your life and design your desired lifestyle. Get his free ebook, Unleash Your Maximum Potential by signing up for his free personal development newsletter. You can subscribe to his blog to receive his latest updates and you can add him on Twitter @vincent_tan
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2 Responses to “7 Steps To Help You Take Massive Action And Achieve Excellent Results In Life”
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Hi Vincent,
Taking massive and persistent action is the surest way to achieve results. If we do not take any action, there is no way our lives can change. I like your 7 steps to taking massive action and here are my thoughts on some of them.
6. This is the Secret Weapon You Can Use If You Are Reluctant to Take Action
This is the best idea I have come across in a long time. I love the 5 Minutes Room Rescue. It is a great way to force ourselves to overcome inertia and to get started. There are so many reasons not to start, like a lack of proper preparation or it could be that the task is too large. I think it helps if we were to break down a large task as well so that it seems less overwhelming. When we have a more manageable task at hand, it is easier to get started with the 5 Minutes Room Rescue as well.
7. Review and Fine Tune
Reviews are important. The best laid plans rarely turn out the way we expect them to. Thus it is prudent to review our progress regularly to make sure we are on track and to adjust our plans if we are not. Only when we do so can we hope to move nearer to our goals and achieve the results that we want.
Thank you for sharing this useful article!
Irving aka the Vizier
Hi Vincent!
I don’t quite agree with you:
1. Knowledge is power – but it has to be the knowledge of proper areas.
2. Have an end in mind – ok, important, but some people specially havily in debt may not be able to think in such cathegories. Sometimes even getting out of that seem to be too much to ask and going small steps may be the only way their brains may go.
But I very much liked:
3. Brainstorm for strategies – ok, with people that already dealed with such cases. And making your strategy shilded with “and what if it won’t work?” at every step is a good idea too.
4. Start moving – YES! The most important part I would say.
6. Secret weapon – great idea, I have to use it today during cleanup. ^^’
And my fav part:
7. The Review – it’s important to be sure that we go the right way, but also it keep us in momentum when we daily/weekly can see that we are actually moving
Thanks for your post, It was a nice read
Andrzej