The pocket guide to action summary

Book: The pocket guide to action by Kyle Eschenroeder

This book lists a hundred reasons to act, like removing paralysis, learning, making it easier, creating opportunities, or stress-relieving.

Main ideas:

Act to create positive

Act to learn

• Genius is the ability to put in effect what is in our minds.
• Action brings facts, which bring clarity.
• Act to test theories.
• Failure brings experience, strength, knowledge, relationship.
• Action is worth much more than thinking without doing.
• The more experiments, the better.
• The knowledge that comes from action is more vivid and lasting.
• Action will bring you your uniqueness. You can think the same, not execution will always be different.

Act to make it easier

• Action will make you more resistant, pain-tolerant.
• Action train your courage, which will be your base level in a hard time.
• Action build momentum.
• Action shows what we are capable of.
• Action is your tool to express your mind. It will be bad at first. But after practice, your tool will be sharp and your real-world creations will be more defined.
• Greatness requires long practice.
• Einstein said, “I’m not so smart, I just stay with problems longer”.

Act to create your chance

• Act to conquer chance.
• Action creates unexpected opportunities.

Act to remove negative

Act to remove paralysis

• Don’t look for your passion. Act and your passion will grow.
• Bad questions lead to paralysis. Life is more about action than purpose.
• The need to know everything, to have complete information, leads to inaction.
• Act even if you don’t yet understand everything, it’s better than waiting to understand.

Act to avoid pain and wasted energy

• Not acting now leads to frustration and exhaustion.
• Don’t wait for motivation to act. Action motivates.
• Success requires much more action than visualization.
• Overthinking deplete you of the energy that could be used to act.
• You can’t waste time by acting, because even in the worst case you learn.
• Taking initiative is much rarer than the resources required to act.

Act to relieve stress, fears, and anxieties

• Inaction can come from the fear of rejection. But action will attract everyone else who admires you for getting over your fears.
• Action tame fears.
• Act to compensate for your insecurities.
• It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.
• Repetitive, mechanical actions calm stress.
• Stress is like mosquitos, as soon as you stop moving, they find you. No mosquito can bite you if you’re constantly on the run.
• Action helps you refocus from failure to learning.

How to act

• Get around roadblocks instead of climbing them, whenever possible.
• Watch out to not aim too big, which leads to inaction and justifies failure.
• Instead of asking “why” ask “why not”.
• Act as if you had to.
• Stay hungry to act.
• To build a minimum viable product, remove any feature, process, or effort that doesn’t contribute directly to the learning you seek.
• You only need 2 weeks to test the vast majority of things.
• Don’t focus on your perceived probability of success, because it vastly underestimates the value of first-hand experience even if you can’t reach your goal. It’s often only once on the path that you’ll get the solutions to what made the journey look unachievable initially.
• Don’t consider if you “should” or if you are “ready” to do the right action.
• Start with a single habit. Practice until you do it without thinking. Then move to the next habit.
• Patience, meditation, reading, or visualization can be action IF they bring solutions, not push back action.