Bias Toward Action
Being productive, building, creating, these are all things I aspire to. Yet they are easily bastardized. In the past, I fell into a common trap: searching for the perfect tool, usually digital, that would magically make me productive, creative, and effortlessly capable. This led to the deification of the shiny and new, constant tinkering, jumping from app to app, system to system. A perfect way to procrastinate on getting real work done. On actually building.
After much reflection, I’ve mostly passed through that phase. I’ve simplified my systems, narrowed my app stack to the essentials, and I am loath to upend things, no matter how tempting the newest tool may be. I’ve learned to use inertia as a tool to keep me grounded in a trusted system.
Instead of chasing the shallow pursuit of the next app or system, I am now trying to explore and solidify Fundamental Principles—ideas that are tool-agnostic and era-agnostic. Solid scaffolding to build character and the individual good life [1]. Both of which require a constant effort of building or creating something, this includes building yourself into the person you want to be.
One principle I keep returning to is the idea of bias toward action. Patience has its place. Letting life unfold is a skill. But most of the time, there’s little reason not to just start. We can set aside the idea of a destination, which belongs to the finite game. In the infinite game of life, we simply move in a direction and course-correct as we go.
To bias toward action means doing the next thing that moves you forward. You might recognize the opposite pattern: you get excited about a business idea or project, but doubt yourself, subtly or overtly. Either way, you don’t start. You read blog posts. Then you buy a course. Then you get lost on YouTube. You spend weeks refining a note-taking system. Finally… you lose interest.
To bias toward action, you return to the present. You stop fixating on some perceived destination you continually fret you don’t know how to reach. You just begin. You make the call. You put up the website. You start building the slide deck. You trust yourself to figure it out along the way (this is basically bias toward action in a nutshell).
Yes, you’ll need to learn skills, gather knowledge, and refine processes. But you can learn in parallel. Always favor the path that gets you creating right now. Most learning comes from doing, so step forward, and you’ll figure out exactly what you need.
Just keep moving, trusting yourself to learn as you go. Let time reveal the true path. You cannot know every step beforehand. Action allows the clock to start, and then you can navigate what unfolds in front of you.
- There’s a beautiful quote from Will Percy to his nephew: “My whole theory about life is that glory and accomplishment are of far less importance than the creation of character and the individual good life.” The Individual Good Life is a concept that keeps pulling at my mind. ↩︎
