Act or think?

We should think before do something – this phrase I hear constantly since my childhood. And it is pretty logical: we should understand why we should do something, what would be the consequences of our actions and we should carry out a thorough plan and implement it. But my experience shows me that such way doesn’t always work. Often we try to understand something, but don’t have much success. Sometimes we even don’t know what we should try to understand. Such times require actions without understanding.

Imagine that you want to be good at playing football or swimming or boxing. You can spend thousands of hours thinking about it, you can read tons of literature about these sport disciplines and you can talk about it with as many people as you can. As the result you would be good at thinking, reading and talking but not at playing football, swimming and boxing.

This is also fair for business and value creation. If we don’t understand how to do it there is always the room for a try. We begin to do something and understanding comes to us during the process.

Action and understanding are like two sizes of a coin, like good and evil, like life and death, like doctors and patients – they can’t do without each other.