📄 Learning as a Way to Procrastinate

Learning is never bad, but more often than not, it's not helpful.

Quite often, when we want to see different results in our lives, we resort to learning.

Techniques, strategies, skills… All very useful.

Except that in some cases, the thing we need most is to apply what we’ve already learned.

Especially when there’s problems, a lack of money, or a messy situation that needs cleaning up.

Yet somehow, we’re being pulled back to learning more.

Part of the reason is the way online marketers talk to us:

“Don’t miss out, because without this thing you’ll never make it” and similar fear-driven marketing ploys.

Another part of the reason has to do with feelings, especially feelings of inadequacy or inferiority.

We don’t believe we can fix this or that problem, and so we decide to learn more - to upgrade ourselves.

And again: that’s always useful, but not always the most helpful.

If a guy sees that his house is on fire, should he learn how to operate a fire truck? Not exactly the best way to solve the problem.

There’s no sense in learning Photoshop if what you need is a simple method to resize photos.

Learning the ins and outs of LinkedIn marketing is pointless, if you need clients fast and you have a list of previous clients that you haven’t contacted in a while - much more useful to simply step up and take action: talk to those people.

Or, one of my own examples from when I still used Wordpress and I didn't have a developer: Learning how to change stuff on my website in order to improve my systems, when what I really needed was to meet more inspiring people.

Whenever you're triggered to add knowledge in order to solve a problem, always ask yourself: should I put more stuff into my brain right now… or should I choose an action and launch into it full on?

With everything that I've learned to date, what specific, strategic actions can I take, to start resolving the problem?

In many cases, you’ll get more results from doing than you would from learning.

Never let learning be an excuse to procrastinate on doing those things that really move the needle for your business.