I would like to hear stories of your personal journey of action taking vs. learning.

For me, when I first started taking online business serious in 2003, I was about 70% learning VS. 30% action.

In about 2005 I was 60% vs. 40%.

Currently I'm about 70% action and 30% studying. When I say studying I mean keeping on top of the latest trends, reading marketing material, keeping my mind fresh, etc.

How about you?

Great topic Bro!!!

Off the cuff:

10% Learning
90% Action
but... that 90% Action still accounts for much of my learning. Why? Because not everything works (or works as well as I wish). So, I'm constantly learning from experience.

Like you, I still invest heavily at learning. I've spent well over $12,000 in last 60 days or so on learning programs, seminars, etc.

Life changing phrase (I share in my live presentations):

When I started it must have been 99% learning. I spent way too long in that phase. I had a cushy job and little incentive to take action. I always wanted to know everything.

I'm now about 70% action but am working hard to get that up to 90%. I know all I need to take my business to 7 figures. Just need to refresh & top-up that knowledge every now and then.

I never made money learning anything, but I sure made some by taking action. And I learned just as much along the way

Good post! Everything for me now comes down to "is it worth it? can I obtain tangible results from doing this and get a positive ROI?"

But I still keep my education alive because I know there's a pot of gold to be gained in the future as a result.

Yes, Virginia, there IS a Santa Claus! And I have him in my hip pocket!!

Cheers,

John

hmmmm...well...when I get an idea in my head (like freelance copywriting), I tend to dive right in whether I am prepared or not.

So I'd say that I started off 10% learning, 90% action. Most of what I did was business copy and press releases, so as a novice most of my mistakes were in the running of the business (handling clients. too little seed investment, lack of self marketing savvy)

Right now my learning and action ratio is more proportionate. And yes, I agree with the statement that learning also happens when you take action.

Action is learning. You're talking about a false dichotomy.

Surprising, since copywriters use the A/B split run test, a fusion of action and learning.

Studying without having a framework for eventual action results in paralysis by analysis and trivial pursuit. It you don't have any idea of eventual action, anything you might study could be the right thing.

A bias for action, in turn provides real learning you don't have being several levels of abstraction removed in academia.

One of the hot new 2.0 ideas out there is perpetual beta. Rather than spend ages building requirements which probably won't last five minutes in contact with real customers and real competitors, get a prototype out there fast, quick, and cheap.

Prototype cheaply, iterate quickly, and learn on the run.

For the book larnin' folk, check out Putting a Bias for Action into Planning Agency Management: A Practitioner's Perspective. If it's heavy enough to chuck at people who think study and action are different things, it may be useful.

Only the fool acts and learns nothing from it. That's how you get the same failures, over and over, with minor variation. It's common, not desirable. Most 20 year old businesses haven't been in business twenty years -- they've been replaying the same first year or two over and over.

It's not a 60/40 or 10/90 proposition.

Of course you learn by taking action. Let me break this down more elementary, I don't want this thread to turn into what's taking action vs. what's learning, etc.

To put this at a 2nd grade level. My real question is, how much do you sit down with the computer off and read a book to improve your marketing, or lay in your bed reading a marketing or copywriting newsletter VS. actually DOING meaning not learning, but actually sitting there pushing out a sales letter, or setting up variables to test on your site, etc. There's a clear difference.

I know exactly what your saying to there's no need to explain. I'm simply looking for the %'s here.

I actually think about this topic a lot - great thread.

I look at it as "inhaling vs exhaling" ... as a visual metaphor, that really helps.

"inhaling" = learning, watching related dvds, competitive research, reading, learning new software (I'm tackling after effects now, it's a bear)... all the skill-sharpening activities..

"exhaling" = creating new sites, videos, emailing my lists, "producing".


The ratio depends: when I'm in a product launch mode, it's 110% action only... after launch (like now), I'm 50-60% learning/inhaling...

The key is, you can't just "smoke it but not inhale", lol, eg read it but not put it into action, skim but not fully integrate and translate lessons learned into specific action; I'm always thinking "how can I USE this?", being a sponge, as Michel would say, for learning new things constantly...

both are needed... percentages change depending on product cycles and customer buying cycles...

that's my biggest personal discipline issue... is making myself focus a lot on PRODUCTION and not just learning... I Love reading and learning and doing research, and could just do that my whole life (and 100 lifetimes, easily) ... so the challenge is making yourself limit your learning to allocate time for productive work, too. It's my biggest challenge. I love learning, and teaching, the challenge is getting the ratio right.

and I hate admin work, and the very idea of maintaining blogs and linking up rss feeds and doing backend php programming for aff programs gives me chills... and I don't like maintaining my ppc accounts and drafting ads and managing spends by time and geography sorts and the rest of it... though all necessary...

I'd much rather learn and teach, learn and teach...

-k

I like that "inhale/exhale" metaphor, Ken, and I'm with you; I'd rather learn and teach than do admin stuff.

Being new at internet marketing, my time is probably 88% learning and 12% action. I was finding myself downloading everything I came across and trying to read every single PDF. I was absorbing all (okay, some) of this information but it wasn't telling me what to do next. So I decided I would make a plan and start the doing. Then I would learn what I needed to know for each step. That has worked so much better and I'm finally getting somewhere.

When I first started, all I did was learn. 100%.

But it took me a while to realize that I had developed a habit of learning that was holding me back. Learning is easy for me. Too easy.

So I started DOING...

Hmmm... Good things started happening. More money started coming.

So I DID some more. And what do you know... more good things came my way.

Now things are different. 80% doing... 20% learning...

The percentage doesn't mean much to anyone but me. Because for each of us, the size of our pie is different.

For me, now I learn so that I can DO.

I learn when I NEED to learn. When I know that my LACK of knowledge is holding me back.

Learning just to learn, for me, is now a waste of my time. Even though that's what I like to do... it's really entertainment for me.

I have to be careful about that.

The fact is, most of the folks on this board have forgotten more about marketing/copywriting than most people will ever know.

I have a long way to go... like everyone. That's really the fun of it.

But I DO know enough to create a WHOLE LOT MORE SUCCESS than I've done so far.

All it requires is some more DOING.