The world belongs to those that take action

The world belongs to those that take action.

Sir Francis Bacon said “Knowledge is power”. That is a very true statement. Now more than ever in the world we are living in, those that know have power over those that do not know. I believe however that Sir Francis should have said “Applied knowledge is power”. If you know and you don’t do, you don’t know. It is as simple as that.

John Ruskin an English author said “What we think or what we know or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do”

In the world of business, you don’t get paid by what you know; you get paid by what you do. An old friend of mine, now deceased, used to tell me that “the universe rewards action” and he was so right. This man was an electrician, his last name was Barbosa. I was working at the time in Mueblerias Tartak in Ponce de Leon Stop 18 and I was only 16 years old.

Even though he had no formal education, he certainly knew about many aspects of life. Once he taught me how to have someone write a four digit number and he would look at it and write a number and he would tell someone else to write a four digit number and he would write a four digit number and then the person would write another four digit number and he would write the last number. The person would then add the total and lo and behold, Barbosa had the right answer written in his little piece of paper before the numbers were even written. I have never forgotten that trick and to this day I show my friends. He had no formal education but he was a graduate of the University of Life and he was a man of action. He taught me something I didn’t learn in school, I learned from him.

Working with many companies through the years, I have seen many executives get bogged down in analyzing, taking apart, thinking about, dissecting, studying and planning when what was really needed was to take action.
Taking action triggers momentum that will most times carry you to success. You let everyone around you know that you mean business. People start paying attention when they see you act and do stuff. You begin to discover and find out things from your experience that can’t be learned in books and manuals or listening to others. You begin to get honest feedback from members of your team about how to do it better, more effectively and more quickly. Yes, many good things begin to flow in your direction once you start doing it. Once you start taking action.

Over the years in this business of human accomplishment and performance, I have found that the one thing that seems to separate winners from losers more than anything else is that winners just do it. They take action.

Everything else set aside, they simply square their shoulders, get their head down and they attack the project that needs to be done.

Even if it is a rocky start, they learn from their mistakes, they make the necessary corrections and keep plugging all the time building momentum until they finally produce results, sometimes not as much as they would have wanted but many times more than what they thought they could get at the beginning.

To be successful in life, you have to do what successful people do, and if you look at highly successful people, especially leaders, you will notice that they are action oriented, they are go getters; they move and get things done.

Tom Peters, the famous management consultant whom I met when we both spoke at the Success Magazine Entrepreneurial Conference a few years ago in Orlando, made this point in a very short but effective phrase. He said “Ready, fire, aim”. I initially thought he had gotten confused because I was used to hearing, “Ready, aim, fire”. Soon he explained that in today’s world you can’t afford the luxury of thinking or planning too much and not taking action because someone else will beat you to the punch. So, his motto was “Ready, fire, aim”
Apple just introduced the I-Pad. They took action before anyone else. Guess what, Dell just announced that they were coming out with an I –Pad. Good for them, but Apple is now way ahead. They fired first.

Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth president of the United States said “Things may come to those that wait, but only the things left by those who hustle”.

I just gave a speech this morning to the agents of a large insurance company based in New Orleans.

I told them that the most important asset a human being has is time. Yet what is time?
Everyone has difficulty trying to define it. Try it yourself, ask a few people in your company or in your neighborhood to define time and you will see what kind of answers you get.

Even Isaac Newton when asked, said that “time is absolute”. That answer is certainly a big help, right? Of course not.

But Einstein came to our rescue when he defined time as a series of events. In other words, time is everything that happens to you in life and how you arrange or prioritize those events.

The key in life is to use your time taking action, not thinking about taking action. Use your time to do, not to talk or think. Yes, you have to think things over, but if you think so much to the point that nothing happens, hey you are thinking too much and doing too little.

Let your actions speak for you.