The Monday Challenge: Throw away your ideas. Take Action instead.

I’m a “list person.” I make lists constantly – in the mornings as I’m planning my day, on trains, on airplanes, in coffee shops, wherever.

Lists turn into ideas, and while some of the ideas might even be good ones, TAKING ACTION on these ideas is the only thing that matters. Ideas are just ideas.

One of the toughest parts of building a company is that every day you have 50 ideas to implement and time to get to about half of one.

And… once you put a new idea in place, are you challenging your assumptions about whether or not it’s really working?

Watch what I’m doing with stacks and stacks of ideas I’ve collected over the past two years, and how I’m taking action to focus on what I am DOING rather than what I am THINKING:

Thomas Edison, at the age of 67, lost everything in a fire. All of his laboratories, prototypes, and machinery. His reaction?

Edison told his 24-year-old son, “Go get your mother and all her friends. They’ll never see a fire like this again.” When Charles objected, Edison said, “It’s all right. We’ve just got rid of a lot of rubbish.” (from “Thomas Edison’s Reaction To His Factory Burning Down Shows Why He Was So Successful” on Business Insider. Read more about this as well in Ryan Holliday’s book – “The Obstacle is the Way.”)

In his podcast episode on The Tim Ferris Show, Paulo Coelho was asking how he records ideas, how he takes notes. His reply [paraphrase] – “I don’t write anything down. Good ideas will stay with me and I will remember them later when I write.”

If you’re a startup with IDEAS but need help with TAKING ACTION, send me an email and let me know what is getting in your way, slowing you down and stopping you from getting your startup where you need it to go.

Email me here: scott [at] salesqualia [dot] com