What I’ve Learned About “Doing” After Publishing my First 3 Medium Stories

“There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.” — John F. Kennedy

We’ve all heard it before, there’s countless articles and talks saying; “Doing, doing, doing, you need to be doing. Quit the thinking and start doing!”

The fact is, doing is uncomfortable. It is so incredibly easy to get stuck in the thinking and planning phase because that’s where it’s most comfortable — you have a bunch of ideas you can foster and grow without the risk of failure or the judgement from others. But just thinking, without any doing is doing nothing for you.

Getting excited about a lot of ideas can seem like your making progress, but you're not! That’s the mind playing tricks on you, it doesn’t want more work and it doesn’t want you taking action. It can seduce you so much that the idea of something becomes more satisfying than the thing itself.

I was there, for 6 months I wanted to start publishing my writing but didn’t. I kept thinking and planning. There would always be another excuse to not hit publish — “this piece isn’t good enough, who would read this?, I need more stories before I publish this one.”

What I’ve learned About Doing

After I hit publish on 3 articles what I’ve learned, and what I’ll tell you; is that it is very true that once you commit to doing, the momentum will carry you. Doing lets you see results and that will make you want more results.

How do you achieve more results? Doing! It’s a cycle, the more results you see the more you want and to get more results requires more doing. Once you get started you have no choice but to keep doing.

I have made a pact to myself that I will publish 5 articles a week. In doing so, today was the first morning I have ever woken up with an excitement to write. I would usually wake up and go through the motions — go to my desk, read medium articles, get in a state of flow and start writing. Today however, I knew I had something to do. I couldn’t simply do what had become a habit of going into my bucket of unfinished work to write and edit for a few hours — very rarely getting a completed a product, just 50–70% completed work. No, now that I’ve started doing I need a finished product. And I need it today!

When I was in the thinking stage I had no deadline, it was alright to leave everything in the queue. But that isn’t going to work anymore!

In Conclusion

Just thinking about something won’t get you anywhere. To achieve something you need results and they come through doing.

Thinking might be more comfortable than doing, but doing is much easier than thinking. Often thinking about doing something is much more stressful than actually doing it.

Doing means shortening the checklist, gaining progress and building results.

If you ask yourself every morning “What can I do today to take action towards achieving my deepest goal?”

You’ll realize there’s always something that needs to be done, go ahead and do it. Don’t just think about it.

For me this morning it was writing an article that I could publish today. As a result I’ve got this — my first article that I’ve written in a single sitting.