10 Overlooked Truths About Taking Action

Editors Note: This is a guest post from Kyle Eschenroeder.

This is a holy moment. A sacramental moment. A moment in which a man feels
the gods as close as his own breath.
What unknowable mercy has spared us this day? What clemency of the divine
has turned the enemys spear one handbreadth from our throat and driven it
fatally into the breast of the beloved comrade at our side? Why are we still here
above the earth, we who are no better, no braver, who reverenced heaven no
more than these our brothers whom the gods have dispatched to hell?
In this speech from Steven Pressfields gripping, well-researched re-telling of the
Battle of Thermopylae (Gates of Fire), the Spartan King Leonidas addresses his
troops after a victory. He is reflecting on the fact that when you do battle in chaos,
Lady Fortuna and skill have an equal say in the outcome. Pressfield explains this
dynamic in his equally worthwhile non-fiction work, The Warrior Ethos:
In the era before gunpowder, all killing was of necessity done hand to hand. For
a Greek or Roman warrior to slay his enemy, he had to get so close that there
was an equal chance that the enemys sword or spear would kill him. This
produced an ideal of manly virtue andreia, in Greek that prized valor and
honor as highly as victory.
Andreia meant that judgment was based on actions taken not outcomes. Society
understood that the outcome was, at least in part, in the hands of the gods. What

was in a mans control was how he acted.

We tend to mix this up. There is an army of authors studying successful people and
writing lists of 5, 7, 10, or 20 things that they did to become successful. All you have
to do is emulate the list and you, too, can be successful.
Thats like looking at the living Spartan soldiers and explaining why they survived.
Leonidas would laugh at their idiotic arrogance.
We have become so focused on results that our actions have become a secondary
concern. We judge men based on what they have instead of what they do. We signal
our ideals instead of embracing them.
In his short book Do the Work, Pressfield relates a New Yorker cartoon that cleverly
skewers our preference for thinking about things, rather than doing them:
A perplexed person stands before two doors. One door says HEAVEN. The other
says BOOKS ABOUT HEAVEN.
Hes perplexed. Hes considering the book. Its funny because its absurd and
because we know wed have the same consideration.
Thats where we are as a culture. We run desperately to abstraction and avoid action
at all costs. Thoreaus man of quiet desperation has never been so prevalent.
The world is full of men who are stuck in life. There has been some mass paralysis.
Modern man has forgotten how to take action.
The culture is beginning to shift, though. The popularity of Nassim Taleb and his
Incerto series, beginning with Fooled by Randomness, has brought an appreciation of
randomness to a large segment of society. As well see soon, a focus on action is
dominating the business world as well.
The economist and author of Average is Over, Tyler Cowen, agrees:
The more information thats out there, the greater the returns to just being willing
to sit down and apply yourself. Information isnt whats scarce; its the willingness
to do something with it.
A world that is increasingly confused, uncertain, and paralyzed is calling out for men
of action. We need to stop thinking and start acting. Stop looking at the big red
button and push it. Stop planning and take a step forward. Stop talking about grit
and take a hit.
In short, the world needs men. Im not sure if youll answer the call. I do know some

will, though, and thats all we need. Ill be out there, too. Youll probably find me
facedown in failure. Id appreciate a hand.
The next section will provide 10 powerful and mostly overlooked truths about the
nature of action.
The final section will provide two specific practices that will force you into creating a
habit of taking action.
Your next action? Continue reading.

10 Overlooked Truths About Taking Action

1. Action is Cheaper Than Planning

Do you know why the Wright Bros. beat out all the mega-corporations they were
competing with in the race to taking the first flight? Action.
Robert Greene explains in Mastery that the Wright Bros. had a tight budget and were
forced to make small, cheap tweaks to each model. They would fly a plane, crash it,
tweak it, and fly it again quickly.
The corporations had budgets that allowed them to go back to the drawing board
(i.e. abstraction) with each failure. They spent a ton of money and time on each
redesign.
The Wright Bros. had a hundred test flights in the time it took these big corporations

to complete a handful. Every test flight taught lessons the one who failed fastest
gathered the most information.
This philosophy of failing fast has spread through Silicon Valley and beyond thanks
to Eric Ries work The Lean Startup. We can imagine the Wright Bros. writing this
passage from Ries book:
Ive come to believe that learning is the essential unit of progress for startups.
The eort that is not absolutely necessary for learning what customers want can
be eliminated. I call this validated learning because it is always demonstrated by
positive improvements in the startups core metrics.
Technology has reached a point where building is often cheaper than planning. We
can build the thing and know the answer before we can plan for all the possibilities
and determine how it might work. Ries writes:
The question is not Can this product be built? In the modern economy, almost
any product that can be imagined can be built. The more pertinent questions are
Should this product be built? and Can we build a sustainable business around
this set of products and services?
These are questions that cannot be answered in the abstract they must be tested in
the physical world.
The key is to make the tests cheap and quickly make small improvements.
This applies to everything. Especially your life.
Planning has paralyzed me time and again. I was taught to always have a plan before
taking action.
That led to a deep depression. I didnt know what career I wanted to dedicate my life
to and so I did nothing. I didnt know what girl I wanted to marry and so I didnt give
any a real chance. I didnt know what fitness plan was the best and so I stayed out of
the gym.
Now I do the opposite.
I dont let myself plan or research until Ive taken action.
Ive tried a ton of careers and found which I hate and which I love. Ive let myself love
the imperfect girl and have the best relationship Ive ever had. Im not allowed to
read anything about fitness until Ive worked out that day. I dont let myself learn
about a new diet until Ive stopped eating sugar.

Most of the time, planning is procrastination. Its based on theory. Its going to be
wrong.
Plans are useless without action.
Thats why Step 1 is to take action based on what you already know. Then improve bit
by bit. Then begin forming a plan.

2. Action Allows Emergence

Taking action creates possibilities that didnt exist before.
We always look out at our future from the place were standing. Yet we forget that
this is only one spot.
Imagine walking in New York City. All you can see are skyscrapers, neurotic humans,
and taxis. You turn down the next street and youre looking out into the trees of
Central Park.
A completely new possibility has emerged.
If youre obese then you probably dont see a possible future where youre fit. But,
after three months of working out and eating well there will be a possible future of
physical fitness that didnt exist before.
These possibilities seem to come out of nowhere but they actually come out of
action.
If youve only failed then its impossible to see the possibility of success. The trick is
to keep trying. That next step might be the key to a better future you just cant see
around the corner yet.

3. Inaction is Scarier
The pain of action is acute. Its right in our face.
Inaction tempts us because its slow.
We dont consider refusing to choose to be a choice. We think were safe if we dont
expose ourselves to failure. We dont appreciate the consequences of inaction
because they are slow, chronic, and less obvious. Thats what makes them worse.
You dont get to escape pain.
The pain that comes with action is acute, gives you scars, and makes you grow.

The pain that comes from inaction is low-grade, makes you soft, and makes you
decay.

4. Motivation Follows Action

I had zero motivation when I began writing this. I had nothing to say. I wrote a book
about action but for some reason I couldnt think of the words to tell you.
Its 1,600 words later now and I cant stop thinking of new things to say.
Its always like this.
I dont feel like working out until Ive been at the gym for 15 minutes. Im too tired to
have sex until weve started. I dont want to go to the party until Im there.
Motivation (and passion) will follow you if you have the balls to go without them.

5. Action is an Existential Answer

Im a professional when it comes to existential crises. Ive spent a large portion of my
life in what is the meaning of my life? mode. Ive come up with a lot of clever
answers. Some of them even felt original.
The only one that ever really works is disappointingly simple: do something.
The meaning of my life cannot be summed up in a pithy quote or even the most
complete philosophy.
It is impossible to give yourself a satisfying purpose in the abstract.
It is only in the flow of action that life can make sense. There are no abstract ideals
there, just life.

6. Action Creates Courage

Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the
tough times start. Courage is what you earn when youve been through the tough
times and you discover they arent so tough after all. -Malcolm Gladwell, David
and Goliath
My business partner and I didnt charge for anything for more than a year. We gave
out some of the best content online and never asked for anything in return.
We didnt believe that what we had was worth anything.
Intellectually we knew that we deserved to be paid. Something was holding us back,
though.
Finally we put down a date. We scheduled a webinar and more than a thousand
people showed up.
The webinar was a technical disaster. We started late, laptops went out, our business
password was exposed to hundreds of people, and we didnt know how to run the
software. Everything went wrong that could have.
We oered our course for $497 a price we thought was too high.
It turns out it was too low. We sold more courses than we ever thought we would
and, in the process, made more money in a single night than we did in the previous
year.
Forcing ourselves into a corner made us ballsier than we thought we could be.

People were amazed at how cheap we oered our course.

Our fake courage became real. Now we know in our bones that we can deliver value
to people in a way that they are grateful to pay for it. We know that we are delivering
something worthwhile.
Now Im looking for the next corner. Whats the next abyss to jump into? What is
something else I know Im capable of but dont know Im capable of?

7. Explanations Follow Actions

Neuroscientist David Eagleman told the participants of a 2004 study to, Move your
finger when the impulse grabs you. He reports on his findings in Incognito: The
Secret Lives of the Brain:
Long before a voluntary movement is enacted, a buildup of neural activity can
be measured. The readiness potential is larger when subjects judge the time of
their urge to move, rather than the movement itself.
They made the choice before they were conscious of it.
Earlier in the book he reports on the findings of a study on people playing a gambling
game:
The interesting part came when I interviewed the players afterward. I asked them
what theyd done in the gambling game and why theyd done it. I was surprised
to hear all types of baroque explanations, such as The computer liked it when I
switched back and forth and The computer was trying to punish me, so I
switched my game plan. In reality, the players descriptions of their own
strategies did not match what they had actually done, which turned out to be
highly predictable. Nor did their descriptions match the computers behavior,
which was purely formulaic. Instead, their conscious minds, unable to assign
the task to a well-oiled zombie system, desperately sought a narrative.
This urge of ours to create cohesive stories where none exist is called the narrative
fallacy.
Knowing you have this need should help you act freely when no story exists. Or at
least realize that the story youre telling yourself is probably wrong. Nassim Taleb
makes this suggestion in The Black Swan:
The way to avoid the ills of the narrative fallacy is to favor experimentation
over storytelling, experience over history, and clinical knowledge over
theories. . . . Being empirical does not mean running a laboratory in ones

basement: it is just a mind-set that favors a certain class of knowledge over

others. I do not forbid myself from using the word cause, but the causes I
discuss are either bold speculations (presented as such) or the result of
experiments, not stories. Another approach is to predict and keep a tally of
the predictions.
When we know our stories are probably wrong we can give them less power. Dont
let your scary stories paralyze you. Act and let the narrative follow (just as courage
and motivation do).

8. Action Beats the Odds

Spartans do not ask how many are the enemy but where are they. Plutarch,
Sayings of the Spartans
More information rarely helps unless you are ready to act on it. The perfect plan
doesnt exist.
The great Warren Buett biography The Snowball shows that Buett had no grand
plan when he was younger. He just knew that he wanted to make a lot of money.
There was no early master plan, just a powerful urge and the willingness to take
opportunities as they came.
The uber-successful venture capitalist Ben Horrowitz says in his new book The Hard
Things About Hard Things that:
Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you
must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds
of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine
in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same.
You dont need to know if it will work (you probably cant know), you need to try and
find out.
Your obstacles are yours to face. It doesnt matter how they compare to the
obstacles in history or those of your peers. Its a waste of time to consider anything
except how you will overcome them.

9. Action Makes You Humble

Teenagers think they know everything because they havent tested their mettle. They
dont know anything and so they feel like they know everything. They are just
beginning to learn about theories and possibilities. They havent done anything so
they feel like they can do anything.

In Gates of Fire, an older warrior, Dienekes, addresses a younger:

My wish for you, Kalistos, is that you survive as many battles in the flesh as you
already have fought in your imagination. Perhaps then you will acquire the
humility of a man and bear yourself no longer as the demigod you presume
yourself to be.
Action carries the potential to bring imagination and reality together. But only when
taken consistently and powerfully.
After the young realize they cant do everything they become disillusioned. They stop
trying anything. They fall into inaction.
This is why most adults end up so dull. They dont do anything because its probably
going to fail. They mistook early failures for a sign that they should stop trying.
Thats why theyre bored, depressed, and lethargic.
Instead, our failures should strengthen us. We should recognize that failures are how
we learn and grow.
Just ask, What would Leonidas think?

10. Action Isnt Petty

Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win. Nassim Taleb
Action isnt concerned with opinions, its dedicated to reality.
Action doesnt leave room for gossip.
Action couldnt be small if it tried.

Practicing Action

Here we will explore (briefly!) two specific ways you can train yourself to take more
action.

I. Systems Over Goals

Nassim Taleb oers an explanation to the mental perils of non-linear rewards in
Fooled by Randomness:
Our brain is not cut out for nonlinearities. People think that if, say, two variables
are causally linked, then a steady input in one variable should always yield a
result in the other one. Our emotional apparatus is designed for linear
causality. For instance, you study every day and learn something in proportion to
your studies. If you do not feel that you are going anywhere, your emotions will
cause you to become demoralized. But reality rarely gives us the privilege of a
satisfying linear positive progression: You may study for a year and learn
nothing, then, unless you are disheartened by the empty results and give up,
something will come to you in a flash. . . This summarizes why there are routes
to success that are nonrandom, but few, very few, people have the mental
stamina to follow them. . . Most people give up before the rewards.
If you train yourself to be emotionally rewarded for actions taken rather than
outcomes you may be able to lengthen the time you can spend in active failure and
increase your chances of success.

A possible solution is to reward yourself for following your system rather than
achieving a specific outcome. Select a system you know will lead to success and
follow it.
Eating right vs. losing 20 pounds. Building a business vs. achieving financial
independence. Going on dates vs. having a successful relationship. The first are
systems, the second are goals.
Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, champions this idea in How to Fail at Almost
Everything and Still Win Big:
Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous pre-success failure at best,
and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people
succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what
they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of
discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good every time
they apply their system. Thats a big dierence in terms of maintaining your
personal energy in the right direction.
When I set a goal of 210 pounds and 13% body fat I stopped going to the gym and
began eating stupid amounts of ice cream. When I decided on the system of work
out every day I began a real path to fitness success.
Thats the easy step. The next is the real challenge.

II. Input Deprivation Week

Go an entire week with zero information consumption.
I first tried this last year and it was wildly successful. I got more done in one week
than I had in the month prior. I also ate the best I had all year and solidified my
meditation practice. It was so eective I oered it up to the readers of my blog,
StartupBros.
Most of the people mocked me or called me naive. A few actually tried it, though.
And many of them are still practicing it to this day. Its the most eective way Ive
found to boost output.
Its also the most painful.
You are going to, for an entire week, live without information input.
Stay with me on this.

For one week:

No reading books.
No reading blogs.
No reading newspapers.
No going on Facebook (even just to post).
No watching TV (shows, sports, news, anything).
No watching movies.
No listening to talk radio.
No going on Reddit.
No going on Twitter.
No information input only output!
You must force yourself to spend an entire week with yourself and the people
immediately surrounding you.
This will, first and foremost, force you into action by stripping away every activity you
run to in order to avoid actually doing the work you know you should be doing.
Besides that, it will increase mindfulness, increase the respect you have for your own
ideas, youll have more ideas, unsolvable life problems may begin to make sense,
youll have an increased appreciation for the news that actually matters, youll
become more social, youll gain perspective, and youll become more original.
It sounds too good to be true but its not. Its what happens. The only way for you to
appreciate this is to do it.
When I first suggested Input Deprivation Week I provided the following 5 steps to
start strong, and they still work just as well:
1. Install StayFocusd or its equivalent and put all your time-sucking websites on
there. ALL of them! Facebook, Twitter, MySpace (??), reddit, Digg (??), Chive,
EVERYTHING!
2. Delete your consumption apps. I deleted Facebook, Pulse, and Twitter o my
phone. Delete the apps that you reflexively go to when you have a minute of
free time.
3. Move your books and magazines. They will just taunt you if theyre sitting on
your bedstand or at your desk. Make a stack and put it out of sight.
4. Carry a notebook with you. Youre going to begin having ideas pop up in your
head; make notes of them. I like notepads more than phones because we
associate them with creating instead of consuming. Its risky to take notes on a
smartphone if youre trying to avoid inputs.
5. Take the batteries out of your remote. When you have the urge to flick on the

TV youll have to go get batteries for the remote. This is a barrier to TV that will
save your willpower pool from draining as you stare down the remote thinking
about all the Game of Thrones and Mad Men youre missing.
This may be the hardest thing you do all year. The benefits may not be obvious on
Day 2. By Day 6 theyll be undeniable.
Your focus will turn to production instead of consumption. You will become a giver
instead of a taker. You will see your addiction to novelty and useless information
plainly.
Remember that this is only a week and not a suggestion for a lifestyle. I love books. I
love learning new things. I consume information like crazy. And its valuable! Input
Deprivation Week is about creating a better relationship with information, not denying
its importance.
Like a girlfriend that you didnt fully appreciate until she was gone, your
relationship to information will be forever changed. You will appreciate quality
information and be more able to ignore the rest. You wont be an addict to useless
information.
If you need any support or have any questions, comment below or even email me
(info below).

Godspeed
This was a long post on something that is actually quite simple.
I wanted you to know Action deeply so that you have the confidence to push when
others dont. This isnt comprehensive, but it is a great place to push o.
Remember:
1. Failing can be progress if you use it.
2. The wisdom you receive from action often remains invisible.
3. Judge yourself based on the actions you take not their outcomes.
I hope this is the last thing you read for a week.
_____________________________________
Kyle kick-starts entrepreneurs at StartupBros.com and is oering this free guide of
necessary entrepreneurial epiphanies to you. Feel freer than free to contact Kyle
anywhere on the web. Even his inbox: kyle at StartupBros dot com.