“Action is the foundational key to all success.” – Pablo Picasso
No amount of planning can get you anywhere unless you take action on those plans. Successful people are doers. They think, they listen, they learn, and they do what needs to be done to get from where they are to where they want to be.
You could read a library full of books on how to set up a successful business, but unless you put the information into action, you’re no closer to setting up a successful business than you were at the start. Planning and learning are important, but action plans need to be acted on to make change happen.
Of course, success is rarely, if ever, the result of just one action in isolation. It takes consistent and repeated action to bring about lasting change. This is where planning has an important role to play. Just being busy and doing stuff isn’t necessarily getting things done if the actions you’re taking aren’t focused on getting the results you want.
Successful people plan, and then they act on those plans.
Plans, like goals, can be short-term or long-term. People dream of becoming an overnight success, but there’s no such thing in reality. Those who succeed in their field will have been working steadily and consistently towards a goal over a long period of time, taking small focused steps to get them from where they are to where they want to be.
The Power of Planning
The outcome of a study involving a Harvard MBA class demonstrates the power of setting goals, creating an action plan to achieve them, and then taking the steps in the plan.
At the time of graduation, the students in the class were asked: “Do you have specific goals for the future, and do you have a concrete plan in place to achieve them?”
3% answered yes to both elements of the question.
13% answered yes to having goals, but they didn’t have a concrete plan.
84% answered no, having no goals or plan at all.
In a follow-up after ten years, the 3% who had goals and an action plan to achieve them were earning ten times more than the rest of the class, and the 13% who had goals but no action plan in place were earning twice as much as the 84% who had no goals at all.
Success doesn’t just happen. Success comes to those who prepare to be successful by planning how they’re going to get there and then taking the action steps needed to achieve their goals. Leonardo Da Vinci perhaps said it best when he once commented…
“It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.”
Don MacNaughton is a High Performance Coach and has worked tirelessly to help clients achieve success in the world of sport and business over the past 15 years. The next, highly popular, NLP Diploma and Life Coaching Certificate course starts in April 2019. Click here for more information or to sign up.