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#Post#: 60--------------------------------------------------
Taking Action By: Brian Tracy
By: Intervention Date: August 2, 2015, 6:21 am
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Taking Action
By: Brian Tracy
The world seems to belong to those who reach out and grab it
with both hands. It belongs
to those who do something rather than just wish and hope and
plan and pray, and intend
to do something someday, when everything is just right.
Successful people are not necessarily those who make the right
decisions all the time. No
one can do that, no matter how smart he is. But once successful
people have made a
decision, they begin moving toward their objectives
step-by-step, and they begin to get
feedback or signals to tell them where they’re off course and
when course corrections are
necessary. As they take action and move toward their goals, they
continually get new
information that enables them to adjust their plans in large and
small ways.
It’s important to understand that life is a series of
approximations and course adjustments.
Let me explain. When an airplane leaves Chicago for Los Angeles,
it is off course 99
percent of the time. This is normal and natural and to be
expected. The pilot makes
continual course corrections, a little to the north, a little to
the south. The pilot continually
adjusts altitude and throttle. And sure enough, several hours
later, the plane touches down
at exactly the time predicted when it first became airborne upon
leaving Chicago. The
entire journey has been a process of approximations and course
adjustments.
What’s the big problem? The big problem is that there are no
guarantees in life.
Everything you do, even crossing the street, is filled with
uncertainty. You can never be
completely sure that any action or behavior is going to bring
about the desired result.
There is always a risk. And where there is risk, there is fear.
And whatever you think
about grows in your mind and heart. People who think continually
about the risks
involved in any undertaking soon become preoccupied with fears
and doubts and
anxieties that conspire to hold them back from trying in the
first place.
At Babson College, in a 12-year study into the reasons for
success, researchers concluded
that virtually all success was based on what they called the
“corridor principle.” They
likened achieving success to proceeding down a corridor in life.
Each of us stands at the
entrance to this corridor, looking into the darkness, and we see
the corridor disappear into
the distance. The researchers said that the difference between
the successes and the
failures in their study could be summarized by the one word
launch! Successful people
were willing to launch themselves down the corridor of
opportunity without any
guarantee of what would occur. They were willing to risk
uncertainty and overcome the
normal fears and doubts that hold the great majority in place.
And the remarkable thing is that as you move down the corridor
of life, new doors of
opportunity open up on both sides of you. However, you would not
have seen those doors
if you had not moved down the corridor. They would not have
opened up for you if you
had waited for some assurance before stepping out in faith and
taking action. The
Confucian saying “A journey of a thousand leagues begins with a
single step” simply
means that great accomplishments begin with your willingness to
face the inevitable
uncertainty of any new enterprise and step out boldly in the
direction of your goal.
Not long ago, a couple came to me with a problem. He was working
for a company
owned by his family in which he was bitterly unhappy. It was
full of politics and
backbiting and negativity, and he was stressed out and hated his
job. He wanted to do
something else but had no job offers or potential alternatives
to his current position. He
asked me for my advice on what to do.
I explained to him that there is a “vacuum theory of
prosperity,” which says that when
you create a vacuum of any kind, nature rushes to fill it. In
his case, this meant that as
long as he stayed at his current job, there was no way that he
could recognize other
possibilities, and there was no way that other opportunities
could find him. I told him to
take a giant leap of faith and just walk away from his current
job with no lifeline or safety
net. I assured him that if he did, all kinds of things would
open up for him that he simply
couldn’t see while he was locked up in his current situation. He
took my advice. He quit
his job. The members of his family became very angry and told
him that he would be
unemployable outside of their business. But he stuck to his
guns. He went home, took a
few days off and began to think about his experience and his
skills and how they could
best be applied to other jobs in other companies.
Within two weeks, without raising a finger, he had two job
offers from other companies,
both paying substantially more than he was getting before, and
both offering all kinds of
opportunities that were vastly superior to the job he had walked
away from. As soon as
the word had gotten out in the marketplace that he was
available, other company owners,
having worked with him and his company in the past, were eager
to open doors for him.
As he moved down the corridor of life, he began to see
possibilities that he had been
missing completely by limiting himself to where he was.
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