First off, let it be clear, there’s strictly nothing wrong with thinking per se! In fact, thinking is the greatest thing since instinct. Many things are greatest since sliced bread, but thinking is the greatest thing since before we could think. Opinions differ as to when we changed from non-thinking to thinking, or whether we have in fact ever made the transition, but even the staunchest supporters of non-evolution theory agree, it must have been before sliced bread.

If thinking as the greatest thing has been around for such a long time, what can we possibly do wrong with it?

Well, I know some people - some of them I know personally very well :-) - who relied on thinking to improve their lives. They tried for a long time, even years, without much to show for it. They tried thinking this and that, learning new ways of thinking and spending good money in the process. All to little or no avail. The need to think about improving their lives had gathered momentum through a series of events loosely referred to as life accidents – divorce, illness, accident, financial ruin, addiction, etc. -  but by and large it happened in the manner of a warning light on a car dashboard.

When a warning light appears on a car dashboard initially, typically at an inopportune time, most of us choose to … ignore it. As if the purpose of a  warning light were to think about it. Subsequently, each time the car is started the light shows up again, only to be pushed back to where it belongs again – to the back of the mind. Hoping for the best, never quite knowing what will happen and when, until when happens and hope is not enough anymore.  At long last the car’s owner manual is consulted, in the hope to fix the problem without the help (and cost) of a mechanic.

However, ignoring a warning light on the dashboard is in most cases but a symptom of the underlying problem of overthinking. For most people who are consistently unsuccessful at changing their lives for the better, the real issue is they are thinking too much, at the expense of not acting enough. It may sound counter-intuitive. How can you do anything too hard? Conventional wisdom teaches the harder the better. Well, conventional wisdom can be wrong, too. Thinking by itself only ends up in overthinking, and overthinking actually prevents change. The primary purpose of warning lights is not thinking, but to act!

7 Steps To Stop Overthinking And Start Doing

1. Replace Ready-Aim-Fire by Ready-Fire-Aim. Do not overthink the possible consequences of your actions before you take them. Life is not the Olympics Game where the opportunity to excel and show off comes around every four years only – and only if you’re perfectly healthy, fit and in the prime of your life. Life happens now. There are many “now” in a day. Just do it - fire, then use feedback from the shot just fired to aim the next shot. Then do it again. Taking aim is okay, but correct your aim only after you go along, not before you even start.
2. Act. It doesn’t matter whether you end your (over)thinking with a big or small action, provided you act. Start with anything. Don’t think of size, think only of action. Allow yourself to act on even the smallest part of the idea you’re thinking about. Act, act, act. Taking massive action is your miracle cure for overthinking.
3. If you’re still only thinking, you have not really decided. You need bigger motivation or greater discipline, possibly both. Start with bigger motivation. Is the idea you’re dreaming and thinking about truly important, to you? Would you live a thousand years on water and bread, rather than leave the dream unfinished? If not, find yourself a bigger dream. Don’t just think about finding yourself a bigger dream, take action. Remember, to find is a verb.
4. Good is good enough. An okay plan consistently acted upon and executed works miles better than a perfect  plan executed whenever the time is right. The time to act is always right if the dream you’re dreaming is right.
5. Every morning take the time to visualize your dream, as well as your current situation relative to the dream. Visualization involves intense feelings and emotions. The every morning routine is not about thinking your dream, it’s about living it, visualized in your mind. Picture your dream as you would picture yourself at the beginning of a long trip across the country. Know your destination and your starting point, then choose the best route for you  to get from here to there. Locate yourself on the mental map of your dream, relative to where you are and to where you intend to go.
6. Share your dream with your best friends. Are they touched, moved and inspired by it? If not, improve your dream … until they are, until YOU are, truly touched, moved and inspired by your new, improved dream.
7. Choose your environment. Make sure the people you spend most of your time with are as action-oriented as you, or more so. Rather than choose your friends, choose the environment(s) within which you move. Your friends will come from within the environments you make yours.

Good luck in your new life of thinking AND massive action every day!

They said it couldn't be done. Luckily - for us and for the naysayers - it did get done anyway, it does get done every day. Imagine a world where these kinds of people and projects get our attention and tax dollars. Imagine, happy tax payers. Who says it can't be done?!

You're a baby boomer with more time than money. You dream of being debt-free again, and financially robust. Throughout your life you followed trends - from jeans to long hair to disco to investing in the stock market - but  now you realize it's not about trends and fashions anymore, it's serious business. Your money is decreasing at the rate your predicted longevity is increasing. Every other day science is adding another five years to your predicted life span. You need to be making money again. Not just for a month or two, but for many years. But the landscape has changed. What you've learned is nearly worthless, and what you must learn seems like a mountain. You worry. You Can Do Better Than That!

Many of the things you now take for granted were once impossible. Luckily, your mind didn't conceive of impossible back then. Learning - your very survival depended on it - occurred naturally rather than memorably. It's what allowed you to upgrade yourself from the sippy cup to the cocktail glass.

Therein lies your answer to today's challenges. Simply return to your roots. Reclaim your right and freedom to learn the way you were meant to, by trial and error, or as I like to call it, by the awesome power of zigzagging.

Learn From Kids. It's Easy. You Once Were One Yourself.

The best minds for learning are the minds of children. When kids are beginners at anything they ask questions at the beginner level. They make mistakes - not deliberately, but naturally as part of the process. They don't mind not knowing, they only mind not learning. Always looking for people who already know what they are in the process of learning, they spend time around them and ask them questions. Kids instinctively know there's no need to (re-)invent the wheel each time a wheel is needed. If a child were to build a telescope, s/he would look for some with telescopes, hopefully someone who understands people love to learn much better than being taught. Kids, like grown-ups, can make much progress when mistakes are made, best in rapid succession. Kids just know, anything worth doing is worth doing poorly until you learn to do it well. Why, they even learn to dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music.

You don’t learn so that you can then do. That’s an anxiety reaction and an avoidance behavior. You can't get wet from the word "water." The doer alone learns. Birds are given wings by falling. You, too, learn by jumping, or you’ll never learn at all. Or worse, you’ll abandon your calling altogether. When you learn, if you "fail," you cannot learn less.

This post is about timeboxing, which I highly recommend. In the past I used it only intermittently, but found it to be so effective I now use it routinely. I learned about timeboxing while preparing for Christmas, usually setting aside 12 hours for the task, which for me involves both the making and shopping of gifts. Because Christmas comes with a deadline that will not be moved, it didn't take me long to understand the need, and benefits, of timeboxing. By late summer I decide the type of gifts I'd love for each person. Next I order the materials needed to make the gifts, as much as possible online, or I reluctantly hit the shops. By taking advantage of my flexible schedule I avoid rush hours and waiting in line and, given my dislike of shopping malls, I'm usually in-and-out quickly. It leaves me with about 10 hours to actually make and wrap the gifts. I also use timeboxing when confronted with a project or task too big to complete at once. I might not be sure where to begin, or it seems it will be a while before I get to finish a meaningful chunk. Or maybe it’s something I resist doing for some reason, hence the temptation to procrastinate. In such cases I revert to timeboxing to simply jump and just do it ... for a while. I usually allocate 30-90 minutes tops, let go of any particular accomplishment and simply get going, regardless of where and how far exactly. An example for using this approach is when writing a new article or a next chapter in a book. Sometimes it just flows and an article completes itself in a single stretch, but most of the time it's hard labor performed in chunks over multiple sessions. Timeboxing helps to jump into the thick of it and frees me to set aside any worries about effectiveness and so forth. Then I simply repeat the process until the work is done. To start with enthusiasm, even at the risk of achieving nothing, beats procrastination every time.

Accomplish More Than You Hope For

As described in an earlier blog post, action may result in zero accomplishment, but the absence of action guarantees it. What’s more, action is also a great anti-depressant. Fill your moments with action, and there will be little time left for worry. Once begun - you have now overcome inertia and are focused on the task - action creates its own dynamic. You might well end up working (much) longer than you originally intended. Hours may pass before you even feel the desire to stop. The result often baffles expectations. You end up accomplishing more than originally hoped for.

A Good Repellent Against Procrastination & Perfectionism (These Two Often Go Hand In Hand)

Timeboxing increases the likelihood of getting things done. The box takes away the room for procrastination. It forces you to focus on the best you can do with what you have where you are. You'll soon abandon perfect for good is good enough - a good thing, since perfectionism often creates the need for timeboxing in the first place. If you're working in product development or similar where moving a deadline is seldom an option, product features might be entirely determined by the time available to implement them. If you get behind, you cut the nice-to-have product features.

Regardless of the exact nature of your work, chances are you are practicing timeboxing on and off, too, yet might be unaware of its true potential. If so, read on.

7 Steps To Transform Helpful Into Powerful

While timeboxing by itself is a helpful technique, we live in a competitive world where helpful does little more than score points. To actually win the battle for peoples' hearts and minds, and wallets, you need more than helpful - you need great personal power. Timeboxing can make the winning difference. For it to do so, it must first be transformed from helpful into powerful. This transformation happens when you integrate timeboxing with traditional time management systems and, implied, with your vision and goals. I created the graphic at the beginning of the blog post to help you with the process.

Step 1: List your Intentions - your goals and what you'll do after you reach them. As shown in the graphic, my goal is the achievement of financial and geographic freedom. Whatever you intend to do after your goal have been achieved, be sure to also somehow reflect it in your present goals, work and life. Waiting for tomorrow to be happy would only put you at risk of waiting forever.

Step 2: List the Means you have identified and decided will get you there.

Step 3: List your Resources, starting with yourself.

Step 4: List the Activities you have decided to do, specifically, to get you to your goals.

Step 5: Decide how you allocate your time among your various resources. Time happens to be the one resource not shown in the graph. The step of allocating your limited resource of time to your resources, which all consume time, is akin to gardening where you would decide which plants to water. How you allocate your time is more important than how you allocate your money, for your time is finite. In the example shown, 54% of my (waking) time is allocated to the business directly (Clients & Marketing, and Develop My Offer), and 46% to my Self. 16% of Self time is earmarked for Self Development and Professional Mastery. Since these benefit my clients and business indirectly, it makes for a 70/30 ratio overall (70% business/30% self). With this I feel comfortable given my current station in life. Depending on your family life, career and business, your allocations will differ substantially, of course.

Step 6: Translate your allocations into a graph that will guide you when you plan actual activities and desired outcomes (in the example show below, on a weekly basis). It ensures your daily activities stay in alignment with and in support of your true goals and intentions for life.

My example assumes 17-hour days. Time boxes (the amount of time allocated), once decided, are rigid to a point. By contrast, the placement of time boxes can be flexible, depending on the nature of your work. On weekends in particular, the placement and sequencing of time boxes may change depending on weather and such :-)

Step 7: KIS (keep it simple)! Apply the Pareto principle throughout (the 80/20 rule).

'How much is an idea worth, by itself?" the professor asked. Quiet quilted the room. The workshop had generated many questions and answers, but for now there was only silence. The professor swept the room with his eyes. "By itself, an idea is worthless," he finally volunteered. He went on, "Unless coupled with action, ideas don’t grow bigger than the brain cells that hatch them." Successful people understand it - the most observable and consistent behavior in successful people are not ideas, but action. Most ideas never make it simply because they are not acted upon, and then forgotten. The most powerful way we have to shape our lives and destinies is action. Taking action doesn’t always bring the desired outcome, but without it … What’s more, action is also a great anti-depressant. Fill your moments with action, and there will be little time left for worry. Once begun, action creates its own dynamic and often baffles expectations - likely including your own. Action creates momentum. You end up doing more than originally planned. When you get to work, so does the universe. Free yourself through action, rather than thought, and you might just find it awakens hidden powers that had been dormant. Action sometimes only comes at the price of overcoming doubts and fears, which can be a serious speed bump. If you have great ideas, but few tangible results to show for it, action orientation might be all you need.

Seven Steps To Build Action-Orientation And Habit
1. Do not think too much before you act. Put your goal in your mind foremost, and then act. Correct your actions as you go along, not before you start.
2. Begin whatever it is, now. Start with anything. Don’t think of big or small, think only of action. Give yourself permission to do only just one small part of the idea.
3. If there is still no action, you have not really decided. Go back to the beginning – your idea – and decide whether you are willing, truly, to do whatever it takes.
4. Do something every single day that moves you toward your goal. This is very important. An average plan consistently executed works better than a brilliant plan executed occasionally.
5. To know where to start, picture yourself at the beginning of a long trip across the country. The pursuit of an idea is much the same. Know your destination, and your starting point. Then determine the best way to get from here to there. Each day before you start out, locate yourself on the map relative to where you are and to where you plan to go.
6. Share your idea with three to five people. Does it touch, move and inspire others and specially yourself, when you read it aloud? If not, revise. You might have a weak objective or strategy. When I was in high school I made a decision to become a champion athlete. I realized that for this to happen I would need to train every single day, and not just once. I understood that I didn’t really want to be a champion athlete. Then I decided to travel the world for a year. I realized it would require major sacrifices, not briefly but for a long time. When I shared my idea with others, few people supported me. At times I felt like I was all alone. But I stuck with my decision … and ended up not only traveling the world, but for much longer than originally planned. When you know what’s truly important to you, take immediate action and never stop moving toward your goal.
7. Surround yourself with people who are also action-oriented. We tend to be the average of the five people we spend most of our time with. Accompanied, as it were, by action-oriented people, you’ll move in the direction of your dreams faster than before.

Relevant Resources & Sites

• The Og Mandino Scrolls, Scroll Marked IX, "I Will Act Now"