To Be Successful, Go Out and Do Something!

I came across this interesting blog post called Are You Asking the Wrong Question?

The post argues that people aren't successful in fields like internet marketing, real estate investing, etc. because they keep asking themselves questions like "which book or software or seminar should I go to next?"

Instead, the author says they should be asking questions such as "Why haven’t I gotten off my a$$ and actually done anything with the knowledge I already have? Will I sit on my a$$, thinking about it and doing nothing, and wondering why other people succeed while I don’t?"

The article ends with a very interesting story:

...the teacher of a pottery class split his class into two groups. He told one group their grade would be determined on the basis of the number of pots they made during the semester. The quality of the pots did not matter, only the sheer number of pots created. The other group was told they only needed to make one pot and their grade would be determined based on the quality of that one single pot.

Interestingly, at the end of the semester, the group that produced the large volume of pots also produced pots of much higher quality than the group that was being graded on quality. Who knows why but presumably the group that was being graded on volume didn’t spend any time “thinking about it.” Instead they just started doing and learned from their mistakes until they created high-quality pottery. The other group instead of developing their pottery skills by actually making pottery probably studied all aspects of making high quality pottery. They spent too much time studying and too little time actually doing.