Action faking is the reason you don’t accomplish anything.
Avoid the illusion of progress and get results.
Do you ever feel like you’re making progress, but in reality you seem to be going nowhere? One of the reasons for this is action faking.
The term was coined by MJ DeMarco in his book ‘The Millionaire Fastlane’, where he summarizes the concept of being very busy but ineffective. We do this to distract ourselves or our audience from the real work that needs doing and that yields tangible results.
Whenever you’re presented with a problem, there are usually primary causes and secondary causes. Most times, solving just the primary causes of a problem is usually enough to solve it. When you want to solve a problem but all you do about it is flirt with the secondary causes, you’re action faking. You’ll think you’re doing something to improve the situation and feel better about yourself, but there won’t be results and your feeling of progress will be short-lived.
Action faking gives you the sense that you’re solving a problem but when in reality you’re just wasting time on the non-essential. This is a real problem that hinders our personal and professional development, and most of us have succumbed to it — albeit unintentionally.
An example of action faking is someone who reads one book after another about carpentry but doesn’t do the actual work of putting wood together to create a table, or companies that hold endless meetings about marketing, but don’t actually implement the strategies they discuss on ground.
Our psychology tends to measure progress in terms of feelings. When a person wants to lose weight, they will buy trainers and feel a sense of accomplishment that some progress is being done regarding the goal of losing weight. This way they’ll trick their minds that they’re no longer lazy and distract themselves from doing the actual work of jogging or going to the gym, which is what is actually required to lose the excess body weight. Thus people set up websites and even print business cards and shirts for businesses that don’t even exist yet.
How to make real progress (and not just an illusion of it)
It is important to understand what exactly needs to be done, and the critical tasks of that project. Starting a business is more important than printing business cards of the would-be business. Once the business you’ve created is running smoothly, then you can go ahead and create business cards to identify yourself and the business. You’ll find that on the chain of the most important tasks regarding starting a business, printing business cards is at the bottom of the list.
In entrepreneurship, the focus should be on what actual work you’re doing and the value you’re creating with your product, and not just identifying oneself as ‘a business owner’. For any employment, the title matters less than the ‘role’ you’re playing in the company.
Another way of looking at it is having a lot of knowledge about what needs to be done, in a situation where ‘doing’ improves the situation so much more than just ‘knowing’, which is usually the case with entrepreneurship, business and personal development. Once you know where to go and take consistent action required to get there, you eventually will — and likely in a short time.
Knowing where to go is more important than knowing how to walk. ‘How’ to get there is something you can always figure out.
