You need to take action to be able to achieve something.

Most people accept and understand this.

Why then do so many people not take action on their goals?

For a large majority of people it is because of a fear of failure.

They are scared that if they fail at something, it will have negative consequences. They will have lowered confidence levels in themselves, people will think less of them, they will be defined by that failure.

The irony of all this is that you need to go THROUGH FAILURE to be successful.

Ask any successful person whether they have failed before and they will likely laugh at you. They will laugh because they have failed so many times that it is funny. They have failed so many times that they learnt the right way to do things.

The path to Success most often looks like this:

Action

At the start of a venture / goal you have no idea what will work and what will not. You need to take massive action to try many different actions to achieve your goal. Some things will work, some things will not. Only by taking the action will you know what works and what does not.

Failure

You need to be prepared, (even want) to fail. Only by failing will you know what actions will be  successful. You then start to remove all the actions that don’t work, and dial up all the actions that do work. If you want growth in business this should be a continual cycle. Always trying something new, some failing and some working, then removing the failures and keeping the successes.

Success

You will only achieve success when you are completing successful actions. Unfortunately even at this point you will not be able to rest. Business is dynamic and always changing. Your competitors are always growing and trying to take your market share. As such you will need to continue to try new ideas / processes in your business to maintain the growth.

Most people never make it to success because they don’t take any action. How many business owners do you know that sit around and HOPE that the economy will improve, HOPE that customers will just walk into their door, HOPE that their staff will improve. They are reluctant to take action because they are scared of failing, however they will never experience success until they do start to fail.

Action. Failure. Success.