Action Figures

As a kid I had GI Joe's, teddy bears, and transformers. But nothing was as awesome as the super hero action figures that moved when you pushed a button. All the other toys were good to look at, but they didn't really do anything.

Relating that to business and life seems strange but I have to tell you that action is the biggest difference between success and failure on just about any given day. How easy it can be to allow obstacles like email, phone interruptions, a lazy morning, the desk top shuffling of papers, or hour long desk cleaning ritual, that keep us from actually doing anything that generates revenue or improves life. We can have some emails and clean desks to look at, but we didn't really do anything.

Success comes when we can address the obstacles that keep us unproductive- find a solution for those obstacles - and then take responsibility for what actually needs to get done. So instead of throwing our hands in the air and saying I can't get it all done "I had too many emails;" we find a solution for that obstacle and take responsibility for our own lives and results.

Columnist Herb Caen wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle sometime back: “Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle; when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”

- Jon Bohm