To do things, you must do. We do not learn by thinking but through the process. How have people my age already won Olympic gold medals, travelled the world, and built successful businesses? They are doers.
3 ways to start getting things done
You lose less energy from doing than from thinking
When I embarked on my challenge to cycle for 12 hours straight I found that I had a store of reserved energy within me. Something was fuelling me. Something was giving me energy. I only had to focus on each pedal, each turn of the wheel. There was no big decision making, just pure movement, for 12 hours straight.
How have people like Richard Branson created the global Virgin Group, which controls about 400 companies, alongside writing 14 books and becoming the first to cross the Atlantic in the Virgin Atlantic Challenger II in 1986, for example? How did Nimms Purja become the first Gurkha to join the British Special Forces and then set insane world records for climbing the 14 highest mountains in the world, climbing them in only 6 months? He is only 37 years old. Surely they have more time than I do? They must have got extraordinarily lucky? Right?
No. These people are doers. They know how to get things done. They know how to motivate themselves into action and bring their teams and communities along with them.
Think about it. Or rather don’t. It’s in the negotiating that you lose energy, the decision making. The more decisions you have to make in a day, the more you become paralysed by the seemingly infinite amount of choice. It’s once you commit to something, when you say to yourself, okay I’m going to do this that suddenly things become a bit easier. It’s the thinking before actually starting it that drains you. When you begin, suddenly you see the problem for what it is. It reduces your imagination’s scope for exaggerating and exemplifying. It gives you control. You start doing instead of thinking.
It’s simple but it’s not easy. After all, you may be a writer but how often do you actually write? You may be a runner but how often are you out there running? So much of our time is spent in the motion, the planning and thinking and talking. So much time is spent talking the talk and brainstorming and then we wonder why we have so little energy to carry out the very plans and convert into reality the very ideas that we had just spoken about? What if we were to use the energy we spent thinking we were being productive being actually productive, creating something tangible? What if instead of passionately talking about our ideas we kept our heads down and got stuck into it? What if we walked the walk?
3 tips to become a doer
- Block or plan your time. Without structure to your day and week, you’ll float through the day wondering where the time went. It doesn’t have to be rigorous; keep some flexibility but remember it has to give you an idea of what you want to achieve by the end of the day. 5 minutes of planning will revolutionise your day and give you purpose. Invest in a daily planner and plan your day as you’re going to sleep. It’s funny how even just placing the planner on your bedside table gets you in the habit of planning. The more thinking you do, the less you’ll do.
- Eliminate distractions. The little distractions build up over the day. 5 minutes here, 5 minutes there, until suddenly it’s 6pm and you’ve spent 4 hours making tea or coffee and scrolling on your phone. I’ve turned Instagram notifications off but it’s not just limited to that. We live in a digital age where we are always contactable, where everything is a heartbeat away. Information relentlessly floods us whether we like it or not. Watch out for overstimulation and focus instead on deep work, getting stuck in and committing to the task.
- Build good habits. 41% or more of our lives are automated processes; no thinking involved. Read Atomic Habits by James Clear to learn the science behind changing your bad habits and creating new ones. Some key takeaways for me were: make it easy. Start incredibly small, 1% of your goal. I want to write more so perhaps writing a 100-word article a day would be a good start for today. Adapt it to your current abilities. Don’t compare. Secondly, make it rewarding. Finally, pair it with existing habits. Put a book on your pillow in the morning so when you get ready for bed it’s right there for you to read. Pair existing activities with your desired habit.
It’s the application of our abilities that is so satisfying. It’s not theoretical anymore. I’m actually using the skills I learnt during my degree now. It’s not the classroom anymore. And once you start becoming a doer, someone who gets things done, you’ll find that you gain momentum. You’ll see other areas of your life that you can improve and you’ll have the confidence and ability to tackle them. So get out there and start doing.
