How much time do you spend thinking about the things you’re planning to do instead of going and doing them?
I would venture to guess it’s more than you realize.
The complicated part, generally, isn’t in knowing what to do. It’s the doing that can feel difficult and risky.
If you’ve found yourself shuffling papers on your desk before an important phone call, then you know exactly what I mean.
Chance are the phone call won’t go badly. At the very least, you probably won’t be facing anything you’ve never faced before. But because something’s at stake, you put it off, procrastinate, and sometimes, fail to follow through. Before you know it, you’ve got a laundry list of conversations, tasks, and projects you’ve never followed through on. Things left incomplete.
But if there’s nothing at stake, is it worth doing in the first place?
It could be argued that if nothing’s at stake, you’re playing it too safe. You’re not pursuing anything truly worthwhile.
If you’re dreading a phone call or resisting working on a project, there’s a good chance you’ve spent way too much time thinking and worrying about something you could’ve been in action for days, weeks, months, or years ago.
Where did all that time go?
It went to thinking.
What did thinking accomplish?
Nothing.
Busyness in the mind is just busyness in the mind. It’s not productivity. If there’s nothing happening outwardly, it’s not productive.
It’s one thing to brainstorm, make lists, take notes, or jot down ideas. Quite another to turn over a thought in your mind repeatedly until you’ve worried yourself sick thinking about it.
Intentions may be important to you. But they make no difference to a finished result.
I could lift a cup and put it down with various intentions, and I promise you it will have no impact on the result. I will have lifted the cup and put it back down. I could put it down slowly, quickly, carefully, angrily, cheerfully, or otherwise. If the action were the same, the result would be too.
It’s the same with anything in life.
We make snap judgments about the intentions of another based on what they’ve said and their general demeanor, but the wicked truth is we have no way of knowing someone else’s intentions. Only our own. Intentions basically live in the world of the “mind,” and you have no access to anyone else’s mind but your own.
I point this out because we tend to worry too much about what’s going on in the mind of another. When it has absolutely no bearing on our actions and the results they produce.
Yes, if someone did something to actively hinder and sabotage you, that would make a difference to the result. But that’s no longer in the world of thinking, you see – it’s in the domain of doing. Action.
Don’t worry about trying to be a deep thinker. Be a deep doer instead.
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