Take action and see what you learn

Recently, I’ve been listening to podcasts of interviews with highly successful people – athletes, business people, personal development coaches, artists etc. – learning about what it’s taken them to get where they are: the struggles they’ve overcome, the mindset they have had to have, the naysayers they have had to ignore along the way. And there has been one key theme from every speaker: take action. Let go of perfection, don’t be afraid to fail, and simply take action.

Action is how you learn. Action is how you grow. Action is the movement forward toward your goal.

And each time you take action, you get answers. It’s a great decision maker. If you’re stuck between two options, make a move in one direction and see what happens. You might find out – nope, I hate this. Or, you might discover – YES, this is the shit. I’m going with this!” The answer doesn’t matter. What matters is you tried it, learned something, and then have more clarity in what to do next.

As writers, I think this is important. We won’t get our stories out there if we don’t write. We won’t become better writers if we don’t connect with a mentor or seek feedback. We won’t get our stories published if we don’t reach out to another agent or publishing house. We might not always get the answer we want, but at each step, we’ll get some kind of answer or clue that steers us forward.

Think about all of the authors you look up to. They have all persevered and taken action time and again. They wrote countless stories. They relentlessly revised and edited. They heard ‘no’ over and over…but they kept going.

I wasn’t sure what I was going to write about for this post. I’ve been agonizing over it in my head for a couple of months now. What do I possibly have to say? But finally I got so frustrated by not writing anything that I started to just write and see where it took me. I took action.

And the first four drafts were crappy and unfocused, but each time I honed in a little bit more, and eventually, my moments of ‘action’ led to this. I don’t know if it will mean anything to you. I hope it does. But if not, at least I made a step forward for myself. I wrote a post and I got more clarity about this idea of perseverance.

As we get ready to ring in the New Year, I wish all of you a year of action. A year of moving forward and trying. A year of not being afraid to ‘fail.’ A year of putting yourself out there as many times as it takes.

Be courageous. Persevere and success will follow.

All the best for 2017 from all of us at Restless Writers.