Why Reading Great Articles Does Not Make You Any Better Without Action

So, you read stories and articles about how to become a better entrepreneur, businessman, startup founder or a freelancer.

6 Incredibly Profitable Skills You Need To Get, How To Make Your First Million, How To Achieve More Doing Less, 5 Tools Every Business Founder Needs To Use and so on.

After a few hours of reading them, you feel energized, motivated and ready to start. Go!

But it is already late in the afternoon. So better to start fresh next morning, right?

You know the plan is essential; it was in an article you read yesterday, so you write it down. The master plan is ready and you can go to have some relax before the fight starts.

Next day, you wake up and feel the energy. This is the day!

Today you will make a move. But first, before you jump into the action, you rather check the feeds out whether something important is not going on. What if you do something, what has lost its power in the last 24 hours?

So, you skim through an avalanche of the new, well-written articles and… OMG, you HAVE TO read this, right? 3 Things You Need To Do Before Anything Else, Why Starting With Meditation Is The Only Way, How To Become The Best Startup Founder and many others.

After a few hours, you feel energized, motivated and ready to start. Once again.

Have you ever been down this road? I certainly have.

It is so easy and self-indulgent to read endless how-to articles; great stories, and recommendations from people who know their stuff, marketing gurus and self-made experts.

It all absorbs well and makes us feel good. Learning new stuff is good after all, right?

Passive Absorbents

Without even realising it you became a passive absorbent. An endless reader of the content created by the others. Those, who are always actively creating new stuff. That is their path, their business, their passion.

You, the reader, are paralyzed by the new articles and gained knowledge so much; you cannot make any use of it.

Sure, time to time you break out and try random bits you read – install new apps and tools that “every top achiever use daily” but do it with no plans. Nada. Just random shooting in all directions, hoping it helps you hit the jackpot somehow.

It is impossible to make sense out of so much information unless you stop, think, sort them out and use them.

As Ryan Holiday writes about note-taking. If you find it time-consuming to go through your highlights and notes, writing them down and sorting them, you are not giving them any value.

If you read much without drawing a plan, a big picture where the information moves you the right direction, you are wasting your time.

Don’t take me wrong though. Reading is good, learning while reading even better. But, as always, actions matter the most.

Actions matter

Not a shiny new tool, a new app, a better knowledge of digital marketing done by others matter.

Actions matter. Your actions to be precise.

Maybe you miss a thing or two, maybe you make a big mistake or get stuck. Maybe not.

Being active is the only way how to become better in anything and everything you want to achieve.

A lure of perfectly written articles is strong though. I know. We all struggle to fight back as passive absorbing is much easier. Everything passive sounds good.

Only hard performed actions matter though.

Stop, think and make a move

Stop reading this story now.

Take the last articles you read and liked very much, make notes into your “commonplace book”, create an action plan and launch.

Not in the morning when you feel fresh and strong, not in two days when you certainly feel stronger.

Start now.

There is never a better time to start something new than now.