Action Is A Muscle | #10

Action Is A Muscle

No. 10 — read time 2 minutes

Welcome to The Soloist, a weekly newsletter where I share timeless ideas and insights about life, business, and art.

I'm fascinated by the topic of action.

Not action movies like The Terminator of those Jason Statham series where he drives nice cars off bridges wearing tailored Armani suits.

Action is in taking action in our daily lives.

Why do some people achieve noteworthy and remarkable things in life while others meander through their days without much progress?

There is a ton of writing on the importance of mindset, SMART goals, overcoming procrastination, and putting together vision boards. And I don't take anything away from all of that.

But at some point, you need to take action—and so many never do.

Taking Action Seems Hard

We like to think that taking action is this big scary thing and come up with all sorts of excuses.

I'll do it some other day

I have other pressing priorities

Figuring out "how to do it" is a lot of work right now

I'm tired

Yesterday, I asked my followers on Twitter (already past 3,000–if you're on of them THANK YOU) this question:

It got 113 comments. The most common:

Action

Grit

Discipline

Not only do I have smart readers, they're spot on.

Taking action is the only way.

Fortunately, there is a science-based way to take action on your dreams and goals.

Step 1: Action Is A Muscle

What the research shows is that taking action can be developed like a muscle.

And if you've spent any time exercising you know that muscles grow through consistent stress placed of them over time.

Using that analogy, we understand that to mean we need to be taking action daily.

But on what?

Step 2: Start With The Smallest Thing

Action on the smallest thing is crucial. The way to start on the smallest thing is to recognize that we have a tendency to over analyze. To over think.

It needs to be instinctual. Gut based. Off the cuff.

If you wanted something right now, what is the first thing, the smallest thing, you could do to get the ball rolling?

Often times we talk ourselves out of doing that one small thing because of fear.

Fear of the ball rolling.

Because the ball rolling means it gets momentum and then we're afraid that going after this thing will be time consuming, or not what we actually wanted in the first place, or whatever stupid justification we make in our heads.

But of course you know that is utter nonsense.

Step 3: Keep The Momentum

The beautiful part about developing the action muscle and starting with the smallest, easiest thing, is that you start to pick up momentum.

It’s easier to steer a moving ship than one that’s sitting in the docks.

Once you get momentum you can start doing all the other things productivity gurus tell you to do.

SMART goals.

Bullet Journals.

OKRs.

All of these are wonderful. But you need to solve the cold start problem.

And cold starts require an initial spark, not a planning by committee waterfall chart.

For more on this topic, I recommend taking a few minutes to watch this TEDx Talk on The Science of Taking Action. It's wonderful:

So today, my challenge to you is—what is one small action step you can take to get the ball rolling on your dreams?

If you're brave enough, reply back here and let me know.

(I'll keep it our secret).

-Tom

P.S. Whenever you're ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:

1. If you save a lot of bookmarks on Twitter (like me), try dewey. —
   the easiest way to organize Twitter bookmarks (I'm one of the makers).

2. If you're looking for coaching on audience growth book a slot here.

3. I’m putting together a course on how to network online to grow faster. If you’re interested sign up here.

This week’s newsletter is brought to you by Beehiiv.

Beehiiv is the only email service provider with a built-in referral program. Explode the growth of your newsletter by using the most powerful persuasion tool out there, word of mouth.

Start growing your newsletter faster here.

If you enjoyed today's newsletter, consider sharing it with friends and family. If they don’t hate you, they might thank you.

If this email was forwarded to you, consider subscribing to receive them in future.