I have found that bias towards action is one of the best ways to succeed in any business. It is also a great indicator for future success of teams and individuals. It is not an inherent quality in most people, it is something that can be learned. In essence, bias towards action means that you do an action instead of overthinking it.
Overall, we tend to underestimate our ability to get things done in a period of time, just as we tend to censor ourselves with overly criticizing ourselves – waiting for that perfect results to come. The thing is nothing is perfect. In my case, for example, I had to teach myself how to stop excessive thinking and how to just start doing things. Part of this happened during my time at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (D.School). They teach design thinking, which interestingly is a misnomer since it is all about doing things. Instead of spending huge amount of time thinking about things, they encourage students to act. It is better to build 10 bad rapid but increasingly better prototypes than one well thought out mediocre one.
I find that universities are not good in preparing people for entrepreneurship and the business life. This is because, rather than overly thinking about things, entrepreneurship and business overall are all about getting things done. Get something done every day.
What strikes me most about the mindset of bias towards action is that it is also a great way to learn things. Too often we tell ourselves that we are not experts in something and that others should do the thing rather than us. Well, for entrepreneurs especially, this is a problem as you should know your business and the roles in it quite well. Also, if you can work in various roles, you will know what good versus bad performance looks like and you might also save some money over time.
Whereas many of us have been taught to be procrastinators by default, we can also re-educate ourselves to be those people that we admire that get many things done. This is a process that everyone can go through and slowly condition themselves to think more in terms of actions and less in terms of perfect results. Most success in business, or life, is achieved by gradual steps. Do something towards a goal every day and then at some point in time you have done something, which seemed like something that would not be possible. For example, in the case of learning to act versus overthinking, a decision on acting versus thinking is required. If you find yourself overthinking things, maybe it makes sense to pause, reflect and just do things? You can also calibrate yourself by observing at people who are highly efficient and asking them what their secret is. One helpful advice is also to use any timekeeping tool such as Toggl track to see where your time actually goes. You would be surprised how much time is spent on thinking about a given tasks or a project versus doing it.
So, with all this in mind, I encourage everyone to do the thing that scares you, do not let your fear for failure get the best of you. Just like in design thinking, just do it versus thinking about it too much.