The Take-Action Token
How to find the balance between learning and doing
If I’ve got any free time, I’m usually listening to podcasts, catching up on Instapaper articles or reading a book. I hate having down-time where it feels as if I’m not learning anything useful and so I like to fill the little gaps between other activities with this ‘consumption-learning’.
However, I’ve recently found that there’s a limit to the amount of usefulness that this kind of learning affords you. You could consume an infinite amount of information about business/marketing/AI/[your area of interest] but, when it comes to having true knowledge, you’ll still fall short. The reason for this is that there is a distinction between knowing what and knowing how (ironically, something I learnt from a book). Without contextualising your knowledge in the appropriate way, it’s just a useless waste of space in your memory.
Furthermore, all this ‘learning’ can just end up serving as a form of procrastination. If your ultimate goal is to do X, then the only way you’re ever going to get there is by taking those first few steps. Reading/listening can help point you to what these steps might be, but beyond that it’s little more than a guide.
So in order to solve this problem of inaction, I came up with a little trick called the ‘take-action token’. First of all, you pick something to use as a currency. In my case, my ‘bank’ was in the app Tally but you could use a notepad, real pennies or whatever takes your fancy. Then, whenever you take an actionable step towards your goals, you earn a token. If, on the other hand, you partake in any consumption-learning then you have to spend one of your hard-earned tokens.
So, if I listen to a podcast about how to build your audience, I have to balance that out with something useful (e.g. writing this article). It’s a small tweak to the way you think about learning, but it’s one that can start to shift the balance towards what’s really useful.
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