From Ideas to ACTION | Unlock Success Today

Good morning, Believe Nation. Today we're going to talk about 5 ways that you can start taking more action.

Here's what happened. I'm on jury duties. My duties— duty— my entire calendar is cleared, right? They give us a very long lunch. What do I do? I I don't sit and chill it out. I don't sit and say, "Well, I don't have anything scheduled." I email the team, we bang out episode 114 of the #AskGaryVee Show. I email Matt, my assistant. He's hanging out over there. Looks kinda creepy. Looks super suspicious. Anyway. Anyway, Matt's here, so we're gonna go through a bunch of stuff that we have to execute against. I have 2 calls right after I do this video. Phil Toronto from Bainer RC, the fund, is coming and having a meeting that was gonna be at 11:30 PM tonight. He's coming to meet me at 1. Basically, what I'm fascinated by is that people like to say hustle, and I talk about working the whole day, and then I've talked to you guys a lot about, well, it's not about how much you sleep, it's what you do while you're awake, and this is a perfect example of something that I've watched a lot of my contemporaries and a lot of you, the VaynerNation, right, that say they love to hustle, when something happens, a meeting gets canceled, right, there's a curveball, it's a snow day, right, they take that as vacation time instead of adjusting to it. See, the truth of the matter is, being efficient, executing, shooting for those big goals, is predicated on your actions. Do you take an extra long lunch from jury duty to say, "You know what? Cool, I'm gonna chill and watch YouTube videos." Or do you hustle your face off and try to cram as much in? You know, I'm excited that that's my first thought. Now look, I get it, I'm sitting on a high chair right now and talking down to like, "You should do this." I'm really not, I'm really not, I'm really not telling you what you should do. I'm really not trying to be a guru. I'm not really trying to be too cool. And say, "Hahaha, look at me, not you." I'm really, really, really not. I'm really just making these videos not for the people that find this condescending, not for the people that find it motivational. I'm making this video for the people that are full of shit, right? The ones that tell me to my face every day that, "Yeah," you know, and really want it and don't recognize the actions that it takes to get there. So I'm making this video for a very small percentage of you. To the left, look, "Oh, Gary thinks he's so cool." To the right, That's the best ever, complete blindness. No, the middle. The middle, my friends. So many of you that actually want this, have the skills to do this, right? And sometimes, once in a while, just need to see a different version of it to understand, ah, right?

Ah.

To me, this is an ah video, right? Did you mail it in? Did you mail in that 15-minute call got canceled? You had a packed day, 15-hour day. It got canceled. What are you doing in that 15 minutes? And by the way, sometimes those 15 minutes are absolutely worth calling your mom, calling your daughter, FaceTime with your kids, but it's just making every fucking minute count. Every minute has to count. Every minute has to count if you want so much because you just don't have as many of them as you think. You just don't.

Many years ago at a talk, I was speaking to Rich DeVos when he was on his way up. Rich DeVos, the president of Amway, worth $5.3 billion today. He started off knocking on doors selling soap, and he was working his way up. And I asked him, I said, what have you found? What's the most important quality of successful people? And he said, Brian, he said, we found there's a direct relationship— I still remember him telling me this— between how quickly a person takes action on a new idea and how likely it is they'll ever take action on any idea at all. And so the action orientation is the critical thing. We watch people, everybody hears the same things, they hear the same ideas, but then we watch and we see how quickly they take action. And if a person takes action quickly on a new idea, the chances are they're going to be successful go up by hundreds of percent. Now what most people do is they say, that's a great idea. It's a wonderful idea. I love, I'm gonna do that. Ooh, ooh, I'm so excited. But before I apply it, I need to take a vacation to a wonderful place called Someday Isle. And so they go to Someday Isle and they live on Someday Isle. And who are they surrounded with on Someday Isle? Are there people on Someday Isle? And what is the chief topic of conversation on Someday Isle?

Someday.

Yes, it's their excuses. What's your excuse for not taking action? What's your excuse for not getting going? What's your excuse for not losing weight, getting out of debt, building your business, writing your book, getting your book finished, getting your damn book started? You know, in other words, what is your— what's your excuse? And they'll all share excuses. Oh, that's a good excuse. I haven't used that one for a long time. That'll take me another year. And so what they do is they sit around and the bottom 80% of the population lives on Someday Isle most of their lives. They all have these great resolutions but, and these wonderful intentions, but what's their road to hell paved with? It's good intentions. And I'm gonna do that someday, someday else. So rule number 1 for success is whatever you learn here, vote yourself off the island. No more Someday Isle. Either do it or don't do it.

I need you to transition from the I to the A. Haha! Woo! That's right, I said it. Transition from the I. And what's an I? The I is an idea. That's all it is, it's an idea. So I want us to do more A than I. That's right, I want us to live in the A and not the I. What do I mean by that? Some people, man, they got an idea and all you do is talk, talk, talk. Every time you get an idea, you pick up the phone, you call your homegirl, you three-way, you get on conference call, and you getting excited about your idea. All right? You telling your mom about it, your daddy about it, and you— there's more life in you when you talk about the idea than you put any action in it. Are you hearing me? So do me a huge favor. Write the idea down and then shut up. You heard what I said. Write the idea down and shut up. You ain't gotta share your idea with 50 people. Write the idea down and boom, get to stepping, baby. Get to the action. Because listen to me very closely. Your success is not determined on just what you say. Now, I'm not disagreeing with the you gotta speak stuff into existence. I'm not I'm not disagreeing with that, but I'm telling you, you can't talk about it all the time. You gotta be about it. So I want some action. So that— what does that mean? That means when you wake up in the morning, there's 24 hours in a day after you finish sleeping, right? And I don't know how much sleep you need, right? There's this big debate. E.T., how much sleep do I need? I don't have the slightest idea. I know how much I need. You might need 5, you might need 6, you might need 7, you might need 8. I don't know. That's your business. But listen to what I'm telling you. After you have finished sleeping, after you finish eating, and if you just that immature and you need to get your play on every day, you need to play video games, I don't know, you need to play cards, I don't know what you need to do, whatever you need to do after you finish exercising, I'm telling you to spend the rest of that time in action and you gonna separate yourself from everybody. Why? 'Cause most people, all they doing is talk, talk, talk, talk. That's all they doing is talk, talk, talk, talk, and they getting pumped up and they getting excited from talking. So I'm saying get out of neutral and get it into drive. The majority your day. So on Monday, I want you to have 10— write down a things to do list, and I want you to say at the end of the day, if I wrote down 20 things, what did I get done? And I'm trying to tell you, at the end of Monday, at the end of Tuesday, at the Wednesday, at the end of Thursday, at the end— you get what I'm saying? This ain't rocket science. At the end of your week, if you were supposed to get 60 things done and you got 40 things done, you're gonna be average. At the end of the week, if you're supposed to get 60 things done and you got 50 done, you're gonna be pretty good. But at the end of the week, if you got 58, 59, 60 things done out of 60, let me tell I'm trying to tell you something. You gonna separate yourself from everybody else. Are you hearing what I'm saying? Alright, alright, alright. All I'm trying to tell you is this. Don't let your words guide you. Let your actions guide you. Are you hearing me? Don't let your words guide you. Let your actions guide you. And if you spend the majority of your day writing stuff down and then fulfilling it, you gonna be tight work. So stop, listen to me, stop getting all pumped up about an idea. Everybody has one. Everybody got a dream. Everybody got a goal. Stop dreaming about it. Stop talking about it and get up and do something about it. That A, baby, That action, that action, that grinding, that waking up and grinding. Okay, here's my final one.

One of the, the functions of belief is taking action. We did a survey of about 2,000 top entrepreneurs, and we noticed that one of the things that people who win in that world have is a bias for action. If they have an inspiration, they act on it. I mean, how many of you have ever had a great idea, talked about it, thought about it, didn't do it, and then someone else did it and was successful, and you went, darn, I should have done that? Maybe it was buy that piece of property. You know, we all have that piece of property we wish we'd bought, you know. Anyway, so we're going to be looking at the idea that taking action is part of Law of Attraction. See, a lot of people think you can just sit in your room, meditate, visualize having the perfect car, the perfect house, the perfect relationship, and then it'll kind of just come to you. And I always say, unless you live at the bottom of a hill where there's a road It's probably not gonna be a Cadillac show up in your living room, right? So think about this, the last 6 letters of the word attraction spell what?

Action.

A-C-T-I-O-N, action. Now there's 2 kinds of actions that are critical. There's obvious action. If you want a certain kind of car, you should go down and test drive it. You should find out how much it costs. You should see what it costs to maintain it. You should go, you know, spend, I like to test drive a car 3 or 4 times, go down to the dealer, take a camera, stick my head out the window, say, "Take a picture of me. I'll be back to buy it." Right, you know? Put it up on my refrigerator, look at it every day. Eventually, you know, those kind of things produce car, right? Saving for it and so forth. But there are also things called inspired actions. All of a sudden, you get an inspiration to do something and you didn't know what it was. You don't have a sense of like, "How's this rationally gonna make sense for me to move forward in my life?" I'll give you an example. A friend of mine, Dr. Ignatius Piazza, graduates chiropractic school. He wants to move to Monterey near Pebble Beach where the golf course is. He gets there and he says to the local chiropractic association, "I'd like to join you. I'd like you to help me get my practice started." They said, "We don't need any more chiropractors. We have 1 chiropractor for every 8 people in this area. It's too many." Now he could have said, "Okay, let the external reality control his internal experience," but he didn't do that. He said, "I'm gonna think about this and visualize it and believe in it and something will come that I will do." And what came to him to do was to take 6 months before he opened his office and put a pin where he wanted his office and then concentric circles, knock on every door in every neighborhood saying, "Hi, I'm a new doctor in town. Could I ask you a few questions? You know, I'm starting this practice. Should I open from 5 till 9 in the morning or should I be open from 5 until 9 at night for people who have 9-to-5 jobs? Which would be better? Should I advertise in this paper or that paper? Should I call it Ignatius Piazza Chiropractic or Chiropractic West?" And then his last question was, "If I have an open house, would you like to receive an invitation?" They said yes, he wrote it down. Now over 6 months, he knocked on 12,500 doors, talked to 6,500 people, and gathered over 4,000 names of people who said, "Yes, I'd like an invitation to your open house." Now when he opened his office 6 months later in a town that did not need another chiropractor according to the professionals, his first month in practice, he netted $72,000. In his first year in practice, his gross income was over $1 million. I was giving a talk and mentioned this story just about 5 years ago, and this happened about 25 years ago. Someone said, "He knocked on my door and he left his card, and 2 years later I needed a chiropractor and I called him." Because we work with people we know, we've had an experience with, right? So he trusted his intuition. He took took action on it. Other people would say, "Oh, guess I can't have what I want." You got to be willing to take the action.

But you cannot just get into analysis paralysis either, and that's why you also have to, on a daily basis, actualize your dreams. What do I mean by that? Well, I'm sure you've— I hope you've read some Abraham Maslow and this concept of self-actualization, becoming our best, but you have to actually show up every day and inch yourself forward toward these dreams. And not only show up every day and once in a while inch yourself, I mean every day you have to actually take an action that moves you forward. Not just research, not just thinking. Look, the power of intention is great, but without any initiative, it's dead, right? A dream is great, but without any movement, it's dead. You have to be moving towards every day. You can send an email every day, you can make a call every day, you can write something every day, you can create something every day, you can contribute something every day, but it has to be daily, otherwise it will never become actualized. The highest performers in the world didn't get there 'cause they were lucky. They worked at it longer than everyone else. They had a better work ethic, and it's not that they necessarily always worked harder, they worked smarter because they were doing the research. They were taking the time to visualize how they would be distinct, different, how they would survive the tough times. They really kept at it. Keep every single day momentum going, and if you don't do that, there's no chance.

Think about what's the holy grail between somebody taking action or not. It's one word: certainty. When somebody is absolutely certain, they, you know, the common word is believe, right? But you know, you can believe at a general level, or you can believe with certain— when you're absolutely certain that if I do this, it's going to get that result, and that result's going to change my life, you'll do it. When you think it absolutely is not going to work, you're never going to do it. The middle no-man's land of maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, that's the piece that kills people, right? So if it's a must for you, you got to make it work, right? In our case, right? It's an example. If it's not a must for you and you're not sure, you don't know what to do. So I, years ago, I'd look around and say, okay, how do people get themselves to follow through that haven't been following through? What's the difference? And I started interviewing Hundreds of people, literally, and eventually thousands, because I had thousands at my events. So I'd ask the group to give me their feedback. I came up with this model. It's like the Holy Grail of belief or the Holy Grail of momentum. It's like the difference between what makes the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, right? And the difference we all know is mindset, but like, how's that built? So this is what I did. I created these stupid little 4 little boxes, and I'll scribble it here for you. You think about the first thing that determines whether you can do something or not, and I put that in this first box at the top here on the left side. It's potential. Like, what's the potential of a human being? Like, when you guys started, you proved something no one had done in history. You ran the 4-minute mile, right? For golly knows how many centuries they're trying to run a 4-minute mile. Roger Bannister does it. How did he do it? Do you remember? You did it in this industry, right? You made a million bucks in a day. No one had ever done that in history, right? After you did it, a bunch of other guys were doing it because it became possible. Roger Bannister didn't just go physically practice. He made a shift in his head. He practiced in his head because he could never achieve it physically, so he had to change in his head first so that the result became certain enough he believed it, and then his body got him through. After Roger Bannister ran that 4-minute mile, within 2 years, 37 people ran a 4-minute mile.

Wow.

When no one in history had ever done it. Now here's how it works. The potential for anybody getting your product is extraordinary. They could do what you've done as much more or less, they can do whatever they want to do. The potential's there. The market's proven that. Whether or not they tap into that potential has a lot to do with what action they take, which is the question you came to me with, right? Like, you know, "God, they have all this potential but they're not taking action." And we all know that the action they take is going to determine the results they get. That's pretty obvious. So most people have a belief about what their real potential is no matter what you tell them. And that affects how much action they take. And of course, that affects the result, and then ironically, that result reinforces their belief, and then their belief affects it. So I'll give you an example. Let's say a person has unlimited potential, we all agree, but they take little action, little results.

Why?

Because they have to start with a problem with their belief. They don't believe it's really going to happen for me. Maybe for Frank Kern, because he's got the cool hair and stuff, or maybe it's for you because You're so driven, but it's not me. Maybe Tony Robbins because he's a freak, got these big teeth. Whatever their thought process is, right? They got this thing, right? But what happens is, if you believe that there's very little potential, how much action are you going to take? Nothing. Nothing. Little. And when you take little potential with a little action, what kind of results do you get? Lousy little results. And when you get little results, what does that do to your belief? You go, "See? I told you this was a waste of time. Told you this wouldn't work." And then what happens? You tap even less potential. You take even less action. You get even worse results, and your belief gets even weaker. And this sucker feeds on itself until you are in a downward spiral.

It's poisonous.

It's poisonous and it's self-fulfilling. Now, what if something could happen that could come along and fill you with a sense of absolute certainty? Not like, "I believe," but mean where you know. In you guys' case, mine as well, we knew 'cause we had to. 'Cause we burned the boats. There was no other option. We had to find the way. We weren't gonna live that way. We all did it in different ways and for different reasons, but in essence, that was it. If you get yourself in a state of certainty that this is gonna work, I'm gonna find a way, and if this doesn't work, I will make the way, then you tap a lot more potential. And when you're certain in your potential, you take massive action. When you take massive action, you really believe in something, you get great results. When you get great results, your brain goes, "See, I told you I was a stud. I told you this thing would work out." Now you're even stronger. You tap more potential, take greater action, greater results. That's how you went from $300 in a week to $2,500 in 5 days to $100,000 in a month to $1 million in a day. Same thing with you. And we get momentum. It's why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Now some people go out and they go, "Well, I'm gonna take a bunch of action, alright? I'm gonna open this product, I'm gonna try it." And they'll say to you, I even did it. But it's like a salesman who goes and knocks on the door and he knocks on 100 doors and says, "You don't want one of these, do you?" Yeah, exactly right. And even if he doesn't say it verbally, his face says it because He doesn't believe it's going to work, so his voice, his body, the execution is so weak. Maybe if he talks to 100 people, somebody's going to buy out of pity. They don't want his kids to starve, right? But he's not going to get the result. So the core difference in people is how do you produce certainty when the world isn't giving it to you? You go out and you try and you try. In your case, you're $100,000 in debt and nothing's working. How do you keep yourself going? The way you did it, the way I did it, the way you're doing it. We may not have done it consciously, is we didn't change our potential. That was there. And it wasn't even taking more action. Taking more action with a belief it's not going to work, it's not going to change anything. We got results in our head that made us feel certain as if it had already happened. True or false for you?

True.

Right.

So give me an example so people know I'm not just making this crap up.

Well, I mean, just like when I had nothing, I already knew I was driving like Ferraris and Porsches and stuff because I always wanted those cars. I already knew I was going to have them It was inevitable. That was just my inevitable outcome.

But how did you do that? Did you have a ritual? Did you think about it regularly? Was it one time you thought about it or was it something you had an obsession towards?

I had an obsession towards it. I used to work at a video store, which is the last job I ever had in my life. Thank God. I used to go to work almost every day and I used to bring two magazines with me to read on my breaks. Entrepreneur Magazine, just to read about business and everything else, to read about what other people are doing, look for role models. And I used to carry an Auto Trader with me, and I used to look at Porsches that were for sale. And people always used to ask me, "What are you doing with that Auto Trader magazine?" I'm like, "Well, I'm just picking out the Porsche that I'm gonna buy." Right.

Which probably got you a lot of crap.

It did. People made fun of me. I actually had a boss at that job tell me, "You know, you really shouldn't do that to yourself, John, because it's very, very likely that that is never gonna happen. It's very likely that you're never going to have that car." Yeah. That's the kind of belief he was trying to put in my head. And I was like, no, you don't realize that it's inevitable that I will drive here sometime in the near future with that car when I'm not working for you and drop movies off for you to put back on the shelf.

You can buy a product, but you also with that product have got to condition yourself. You gotta make it a must and you gotta get a ritual. And if you do it, whatever you used to dream about, you thought was so huge, you'll just live it. You live it like you lived this yesterday. Like we're all living the life that we envisioned because we had to. And because we played this game with our head, we got the belief to be real by seeing it enough times and feel it enough times to our brain believed it. And then it made it happen.

Which raised the potential, which made us take more action, which got us better results, which raised our beliefs again.

That's right. And then that's why, that's why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. So instead of bitching about it, change it. This process is the Holy Grail. It's where the whole game changes and anybody can do it and they can do it in a few minutes. And if they do it a few minutes each day, then they get a different life.

Thank you so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed. I made this video because One Life asked me to. So if there's a topic that you want me to cover in the next edition of Believe Life, leave it in the comments below and I'll see what I can do. I'd also love to know which of the points mentioned in the video meant the most to you, was going to have an impact on your life. Life? Leave it in the comments and I'll join the discussion. Thank you so much for watching. Have an amazing day. Continue to believe, and I'll see you soon.