If Action is All That Matters, What Are You Doing?

How are things? Do you have time freedom in your life? Do you own your time?  Do you find yourself moving forward in your investing business and career, and growing as an entrepreneur with unstoppable momentum?  Great!  This brings me to the subject I want to talk about…which is directly related to many of my own struggles as an entrepreneur, and probably a lot of what I’ve ever written about success or investing. Simply put: Action is all that Matters.

Listen to me: just 365 days from today, one more entire year will have passed into oblivion, recorded into history, engraved in stone. It doesn’t matter who you are— mother, father, teacher, preacher, businessman, president— 365 days is all you are going to get in the next year. No more, no less. Broken down, that comes out to 8,760 hours… or 525,600 minutes… or… 31,536,000 seconds. Tick, tock.

Now, let’s say you are richer than old King Solomon and you’re willing to pay through the nose to have more time in the coming year than other folks. It’s not so much that you want more time, per se, not for the use of it….you’re just so rich that you want something other people can’t have. Let’s say you want just 10 extra minutes, just ten measly little minutes that could as easily be used brushing and flossing extra vigorously as doing anything important like transporting a cardiac arrest patient to the hospital or exciting like hitting double overtime during March Madness (yeah baby! Go U of L Cardinals!) and sinking the winning three pointer.

Let’s say you just want TEN minutes…just enough to show how important you are…and you’re willing to pay one million dollars for each of those 10 minutes. So you’ve got 10 million dollars to throw away on a flight of fancy that has no real significance. I mean, really, what could you do with those extra 10 minutes, anyway, assuming you could get them? Doesn’t matter. You can’t buy them. They’re not for sale.

You couldn’t even buy one extra minute….or even one second… for 100 billion dollars. Time is not for sale. It’s as simple as that. Not at any price under the shining sun. During the next year, not one single solitary person is going to have more gross time than you and nobody (except those Lost Souls who regularly go to the self-checkouts at Wal-Mart) is going to have less.

The time we get from day one to day 365 is the great equalizer that ties everyone together. No one person gets any more time in the day than any other person. So what’s the point? Well, check this out. Here is the “so what” of it: The difference from where you are right now, today… and where you will be 1-year from today, depends on one thing and one thing only. It depends on…What You Do with Those 8,760 Hours You’ve Got to Work with in the Next Year! Tick, tock.

As much as we like to think positively, what you just think about isn’t going to effect any change whatsoever, and change, dear reader, is what you’re looking for in your life— isn’t it? Ideas without ACTION are just waiting to get dusty and surrounded by cobwebs. Although no one will deny the power of goal-setting and knowing what you want and communicating it clearly to yourself and to others, I have to break it to you that what you just plan isn’t going to create any significant change either. Just planning’s never resulted in my successes, nor anyone I know.

How you feel isn’t going to make a great difference. What you read; what you learn; what you study; what you discover… none of these things… none whatsoever… is going to make a single scintilla of difference about where you are 1-year from today. We all need to get this straight in our heads: The only thing (except for God and chance maybe) that is going to make any difference at all in our life… is… What You Do! Action is all that Matters!

So, what are you going to do with those 8,760 hours you’ve got to work with in the next year?