Morgan explains why planning without action keeps you stuck. He shares James Clear's photography experiment: students graded on quantity took better photos than those graded on perfection, because they learned through doing. Daily imperfect action beats endless strategizing.
What's up guys, Morgan here, The Habits Coach. And today I want to help you get unstuck. I want to help you actually start getting the results that you're after. And really what I'll be sharing with you in this video is essentially thoughts around taking action and what counts as action and what does not. So, um, this is something that I honestly messed up in my business for a very long time and spun my wheels and went around in circles and got super frustrated and got nowhere. Um, so I lived this for like 3 years until I learned learned the lesson. And now it's something that I'm seeing with the clients that I'm working with is like, there's, there's a difference between strategizing and planning and actually doing the things. And people are usually in this camp. And that's not the thing that actually gets you results. So I also want to tie in this book that I'm reading right now. Shocker that the habits coach is reading Atomic Habits by James Clear. But this is just further fueling the fire and making me want to make this video because I've experienced in my own life, I experienced it with my clients. And he's literally written a whole chapter about it in here. So, um, what I want to share with you to get this point across is actually a story that he has in the book. And it's about this, um, this professor, and he was, he was a, like a film, film photography professor or something like that. Um, and he did this experiment with his students. So what he did one semester is he divided the class in half, right? And the people in on one side of the class were called the quantity group, right? And so they were graded, um, at the end of the semester on the number of photos that they produced. So I think if you— if they produced 100, they got an A, if they produced 90, a B, 80, a C, and, and so on and so forth, right? So they were graded purely on the quantity of photos that they took. And then the other side of the camp was— or the other side of the class, sorry, um, That was the quality group. So all semester, all that they had to submit was one photo, but to get an A, it needed to be practically perfect. And here's the interesting thing— I think this is such a cool experiment, and it just like proves everything that I feel like I've lived through and I'm helping other people live through— is like, the people that were on the, the quantity side actually produced the best photos, right? Why? Because the whole time they were taking photos and they were in the game and they were in the middle of the mess and they were experiencing with, uh, whatever you experiment with when you do photos, like the lighting and the composition in the darkroom and whatever you do, right? They were, they were, they were in the game, they were in the arena, and they were doing the work. And through that experimentation, they learned and they honed their skills and they produced the best photos, right? Whereas the other group spent all their time like— what did he— how did he put it? He put it so beautifully in here. Um, speculating, right? Speculating about perfection. And, and really they just had like these unverified theories at the end. Why do they have unverified theories? Because they didn't effing put anything into action, right? And this is, this is what so many of us do. Like, this is what I did for the longest time. I spent all my time over here in this camp where it's like You know, you're just planning and strategizing and pondering and thinking, and like, you're not actually over here doing anything, right? And here's the thing about this. It's so sneaky because you think that you're doing something. You think that you need a better strategy. You think that you need a better plan. But what actually happens is that becomes a form of procrastination. And the reason that you're actually doing that shit is because you— it's easier to stay in that phase, that R&D phase, actually, as my coach calls it. But it's easier to stay in that phase because if you go over here into the action phase, you risk failure, right? And he puts it beautifully in here too. What did he say? What did he say? More often than not, we do it because it allows us to feel like we're making progress without running the risk of failure. And I've just experienced this so many times and I just see it in so many other people. It's, it's, I It's so true, right? So this is what I want to just— I just want to make this video to bring this into your awareness today, is you need to really be careful with what you're doing. Because if— let's give you— I'll give you a practical example. Let's say you're doing your social media content, right? And you're strategizing and you're planning and you're mapping things out and you're whatever you're doing over here, right? That's a lot different than actually writing the posts and scheduling the posts and getting them out. Because if you do a lot of this and you don't do any of this, you've done a lot of work and you have zero results. And this is where people get frustrated, right? They don't realize they're spending all of their time up here and they're not spending enough of their time actually taking the action. So that's what I want for you watching this video. That's it. There's no real like practical strategy, you know, like do XYZ formula. No, but it's— you have to be really hyper-aware of this. You have to be really hyper-aware when you're over here planning and strategizing and pondering because that's not where a lot of the learning happens and that's not where you get the results. You get the results over here being in the game, taking daily imperfect action. So guys, I hope this helped. If you really like this video, you know, hit me with a like, hit me with a comment. I would love to hear from you. Did this help you? Yes or no? And then if you're on YouTube, definitely subscribe to my YouTube channel and I'll see you for the next video. Cheers, guys.
