Action Can Lead You to Success (Where Overthinking Fails)

If you had to come up with an answer to the question “what do you want to achieve in life” right now, what sorts of answers would you give?

For most people, there are at least a few areas where success in life would be very easy to define, while simultaneously being something very sought after. Maybe in your case “success” could involve going through a medical weight loss protocol in order to achieve a healthier BMI, or maybe it could mean undertaking a serious change in your career.

Unfortunately, success is obviously a lot easier said than done as a rule, and there are plenty of potential pitfalls that you may encounter on your way towards aiming to achieve your various goals and aspirations.

For many people, one of the biggest obstacles to success in any number of different domains is overthinking — the tendency to hyper-analyze everything, fatigue yourself before actually taking any real steps forward, and to consequently end up falling far short of what you would like to achieve.

Overthinking has the potential to get in the way of your chances of success, but taking action — even and maybe especially when you doubt yourself — has the power to lead to potentially dramatic changes, and to help you to achieve success.

Here are some ways that action can lead to success, where overthinking fails.

Many actions can specifically help to give you some distance from you thoughts, and a more upbeat perspective

If you’ve got a constantly running internal dialogue that tells you that you can’t achieve something, or that you’re not ready, or that “it will end up just like last time,” or any number of other self-undermining statements, your ability to succeed will likely be significantly reduced.

Self belief is a very powerful thing, and an active lack of self belief can have some pretty devastating effects — especially in cases where you allow yourself to be totally taken in and convinced by those negative thoughts.

Sometimes, you may be able to push back against those negative thoughts by arguing against them directly — but in many cases one of the best ways of helping to defuse those thoughts is to engage in various actions that help to give you a bit of distance from your thoughts as a whole, in addition to giving you a more upbeat overall perspective.

So,what kinds of activities can help you to “step back” from your thoughts a bit in this way?

Various forms of meditation are commonly used for this purpose. Physical exercise can also help to make those thoughts seem a lot less powerful and convincing. Some people even find that cold showers and ice baths help to shock them out of their heads for a time.

When all is said and done, any practice that helps you to step back and to not take your negative thoughts at face value can be extremely helpful — and for the most part, the kinds of things that will help in this regard will be specific actions, as opposed to just sitting in one place and trying to think your way to a more positive and optimistic outlook.

Many lessons can only really be learned through hands-on trial and error

The path to success will almost always involve a good deal of trial and error, stumbling along the way and learning — and if you try to skip these key steps, you will likely miss out on some very important insights that you will need in order to “make it.”

Today, it’s easy to find a huge number of different courses, instructional video series, and books, all designed to help teach people lessons that will lead to success in one area of life or another.

While these books and courses may be helpful in some cases, there are also many scenarios where learning things in theory and in the abstract just won’t be any sort of real substitute to learning them through hands-on experience and trial and error.

Taking action is the way that you get hands-on experience, and it’s how you go through the process of trial and error that can teach you many of the most valuable lessons, when it comes to achieving success.

Perhaps you’re working out consistently in the gym, for example, and really want to hit a particular target weight, or to be able to keep up a particular running pace so that you can participate in a 5k run.

But what if the routines you’re trying out aren’t working for you, but are instead leaving you burned out, with your overall progress lagging?

Sure, it may be useful to look up different routines, and to read a bit about how you could alter your workouts — but fundamentally, the most helpful thing will likely be for you to pay attention to how you feel, to go through your own process of trial and error in the gym, to record your own results, and to figure out what works best for you.

Suspending your assumptions and taking action can often open many doors that were previously closed

Even if you don’t see yourself as someone who is heavily prone to negative thinking or defeatist self-talk, there is still a very real chance that your assumptions about things end up getting in your way and hiding various opportunities from your view, on a day-to-day basis.

Having a bias for taking action can help you to suspend your assumptions and to experience things directly — and this can, in turn, open many doors that were previously closed.

When you look at many stories of influential individuals out there who achieved a high degree of success, you’ll often find that simple audacity went a long way in helping them to create the opportunities that they ended up benefitting from.

If there’s something you’d like to do, that you believe it would be worthwhile to do, go ahead and try to do it. Maybe you won’t succeed — at least at first — but you will almost certainly discover and create more opportunities along the way as a result of having made the attempt.