Actions, Reactions And Tipping Points

Something I’ve found myself saying a lot lately is “There is no action without a reaction”.

What I mean in this context is that there is nothing that happens without a consequence, be it positive or negative, be the consequence noticed or unnoticed.

This isn’t one of those over hyped personal development concepts, this is a LAW of physical matter – you might recall your high school chemistry teacher saying it. And it applies, equally to the atomic realm as it does the day to day existence realm – it HAS to – we’re all matter after all.

Anyway, how does this apply to us?

A lot of people get frustrated thinking that they’re doing plenty of work but not seeing any results.

What this post is about is the fact that there is no such thing as “no results”!

If you’re wanting to achieve a certain outcome, you take a certain action.

Let’s look at making money online via the analogy of driving to a certain destination. Say you want to drive somewhere that’s 100km away. Everything you do on that drive has some relation to you getting there, and how fast. Ideally you’d like to drive in a way that looks like this:

That’s an ideal journey. But the make money online journey, is more like one where you don’t have a great map – (after all, no one can give you a TOTALLY foolproof method of making money online that will work every single time for every single person – not only that but in this industry you get given a new map every day so you have to work out the route based on 100 different maps)

So you’re online marketing journey, if you DO make it, looks more like this…

Each turn in the path represents you changing direction, changing your strategy, trying new techniques, and the forward motion represents your progress.

Now, keep in mind that every turn in the path above is one where you THINK at the time that you’re making a decision that will take you closer to the destination but not every decision ACTUALLY does.

Each of the red circles are decisions where you changed your approach a little bit. You’ll notice that some of those decisions took you further away from your destination but some of them put you closer – but at the TIME you made the decision, you didn’t know if it was moving you closer or further away, you had to test it.

NOW…

Can you see how it’s conceivable that at SOME point on that path, you’d feel like you’re getting nowhere and give up?

Did you notice also that every action you took… EVERY decision you made (the red dots) had SOME impact on your journey? It changed your direction and influenced your progress even if ever so slightly?

Now, the thing is that there’s another factor in play here, it’s called the tipping point.

Really the graph of the journey towards online income looks for most people like this…

At the start you spin your wheels like crazy. You make a lot of sideways progress, not really going up or down, and the times at which you make small bits of forward progression seem far apart.

You feel frustrated at this point because you’re taking A LOT of action (if that graph were driving, look how much distance would be driven back and forth in that initial stage – that represents VOLUME of action) but not making a lot of progress.

If you’re crazy enough to stick at it when you seem to be moving forward only so slowly, do you see what happens?

There comes a point at which the action you’ve taken has piled up so much that it explodes!

Call it the 80/20 principle in action, call it critical mass, call it the tipping point – they’re all hinting at the same thing.

After that point, the actions you take seem to yield much more visible results. You move forward much more than you move sideways. Your income grows much faster and without as much effort.

Why? Because the actions you’re taking now are the ones that move you fastest towards your destination – that whole initial process was so you could work out WHICH actions those were!

So the takeaways from this post I hope are:

1. Nothing you do goes unnoticed by “the world” (not in any spiritual freaky way – I mean by the laws of matter) Every action you take compiles to form a direction you’re moving and a destination toward which you’re headed.

2. If you’re taking the right actions, doing things right, you’ll get rewarded in the end. Conversely, if you’re not doing things right, you’ll get “found out” in the end.

3. Despite initial confusion and slow progress, there comes a point when you’re actions spill over and produce results greater than the effort that created them. The higher you go the easier it gets.

4. Take stock of the results you’re getting from the actions you’re taking. Are you moving closer or further away from your destination by doing X. If it’s closer, do more of it, if it’s further away, stop doing it.

I hope you got something out of this post – and before we go – how about a round of applause for the talent displayed in my MS Paint created diagrams!