If you really want to succeed, you’re going to put in a lot of time and effort to make it work. You will need to take action. Here are 3 reasons why taking action is important if you want to succeed:

It’s your first step towards success

If you don’t take action, you’re never going to take that first step towards achieving your goals. You’re never going to go anywhere. As they say, it’s always the first step that’s the hardest.

It’s relatively easy to choose the right goal and to make a grand plan on how you’re going to achieve that goal. But actually going out there and taking that first step, that’s hard.

Many people have fun at the planning stage, but the moment they actually need to do something, then the reality will sink in.

“That’s a lot of work,” they’ll say. They’ll start procrastinating, or they’ll start thinking it’s a bad idea. And they’ll just stop there.

That’s all they do – just plan things, but never really take action.

You find out first-hand what’s really working

When you take action, you find out that whatever you’ve planned isn’t always going to happen. It isn’t always going to be feasible.

Sometimes, what you think something is may be different from what it actually is in real life. This is why being flexible and knowing when to adjust is so important.

Your plan is just a general guide – you don’t have to take it at face value. When you take action and go out into the real world, you find out what’s working.

You learn to go with the flow. You learn there’s a better option out there that will help you achieve your goals much faster than what you’ve initially anticipated!

You grow as a person

Taking action is important if you also want to grow as a person. On the way to success, you’ll encounter so many obstacles, problems, and challenges. That’s when you grow as a person.

When you learn how to overcome all these obstacles, when you gain new skills, when you develop resilience, you grow as a person.

If you don’t take action, you’ll remain as you always have been, doing the same things you’ve always been doing.

Reflect On Your Achievements

When you start running out of ideas, or you start feeling like you’re not making any progress at all towards your goals, you can try looking back at your achievements.

Remember how far you’ve come, all the milestones you’ve achieved to date, and you’ll see that everything you’ve done so far has not been wasted.
Start a journal, write down your thoughts and your feelings. You can also use it to chart your progress.

When you’ve got concrete proof in front of you that you’ve made significant steps towards your goals, you’ll feel so much better.

You’ll feel motivated to continue doing your work and to improve yourself as well.

Learn From Others

If you look up to somebody, you can use them as motivation to continue improving yourself. This is especially true if that somebody has found success in life. You’ll learn a lot from them.

You don’t even have to know them in person. You can read news articles and books about them. Learn their background – do they have a special story to tell? Let them inspire you.

You can also start following them on social media, if they’re on there. Many successful people use social media nowadays, and they strive to provide plenty of value to their followers.

Mentor Other People

Teaching other people what you know will also motivate you to become a much better person. Other people are looking up to you, you don’t want to fail them.
You want to show them that you’re capable of being a good mentor. It will help build your self-confidence and your self-esteem.

I’m sure you’ve had a favorite teacher or mentor in school – what did they do to make them stand out from the other teachers?

I’m willing to bet it’s because they taught you a lot about different subjects, maybe about life in general. You can do the same to your mentee(s) – show them you genuinely care for them, it will motivate them to learn. Their motivation will rub off on you – so it’s really a win-win situation.

One of the key structures in this network is a part of the brain known as the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) which is linked to the prefrontal cortex and hypothalamus/brain stem. Damage to the ACC has been shown to completely remove motivation and drive and in extreme cases, this can leave a person without even the motivation to move.

The prefrontal cortex is the part of our brain that allows us to plan and reason, whereas the hypothalamus is the part of the brain associated with emotional responses – it links the nervous system to the endocrine system via the pituitary gland. The brain stem meanwhile is responsible for many of our autonomic functions such as breathing and digesting.

What we can gather from this, is that the attention network is actually driven not by logical thought but rather by emotion. Emotion tells us what is important and more often than not, this of course relates to what is important to our survival.

And this tells us why it can be so hard to focus on a seemingly boring essay or why we put off housework: it has no emotional hook and no seeming survival value. It’s also why we can be manipulated into buying things that we don’t logically need – when those items are portrayed as valuable, desirable or as raising out status (i.e. improving our chances of passing on our genetic material) then impulse drives us to act.

The key takeaway then? You need to find the emotional hook in what you are doing, if you’re going to make it interesting enough to stay focused on.

The Dorsal and Ventral Streams

This can be further broken down into two other networks: the dorsal attention stream and the ventral attention stream. The dorsal stream is responsible for our conscious direction of our attention. This is ‘top down’ attention, which is drive by a desire to focus on specific things to achieve given goals. The ventral attention stream meanwhile is our reactive stream, which is driven by loud noises, sudden movement, bright colors etc.

Dopamine and other excitatory neurotransmitters produced in these areas causes us to rapidly switch attention to that thing. This is why you get the ‘cocktail party effect’ where your ears prick up when someone says your name. It’s also why you might find it hard to concentrate when hungry, when uncomfortable, or when something is playing on your mind.

The neurotransmitter dopamine is known to play an important role and structures such as the ACC have a large number of dopamine receptors. The same is true across the ventral and dorsal structures. Thus, another reason for impaired attention may be low dopamine – in which case the world simply doesn’t seem interesting enough to hold our attention. This is one popular explanation for the biological basis of ADHD.

Increasing dopamine therefore can increase your focus. You could potentially do this with nootropics yes, but preferable would be to do it by again making what you’re doing seem more interesting in the way that your brain responds well to – by making it more emotionally interesting.

Related Info Products:

Brighter Brain – Self Improvement Ebook and Video Package

MindZoom – Positive Affirmations Software