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Life Lessons

Your results won’t always match your actions

Daniel Bourke

• 2 min read
graph with results and actions plotted against eachother, at the start they're the same, as time goes on, they start to separate
In the beginning, your results will increase with your actions. But eventually, there'll be a mismatch. That's when you'll need to think about what you're doing. Keep going until the tipping point? Or stop and start again.

When you first start out, you’ll be making all kinds of new insights. Learning the foundations, applying them. Feeling good.

But then when you’ve learned some of the fundamentals, when you’ve got through the easy parts, you’ll start to wonder where all the progress went.

You may even feel like you’re not going anywhere. Even going in reverse.

Whether it be learning machine learning through an online course, where the start is great because everything is new, except now you have to figure out how to use what you’ve learned and you’re not sure where to go.

Or writing blog posts which nobody seems to be reading.

Or live-streaming yourself playing video games but not getting many viewers.

Or you’re not happy in your job and your side hustle doesn’t quite seem to be at a point where you can leave a stable income yet.

No matter what you do, eventually, progress will slow. It will get hard.

What happens next?

You evaluate what you’re doing. How could you improve?

There’s no single answer. It’s an iterative process. But instead of trying to make perfect decisions every time, make more decisions. Make statistics work in your favour.

The more decisions you make, the more decisions you follow with action, the more you increase your likelihood of making the right decision and taking the right action.

With this mindset, it then becomes a matter of time. A matter of time before your results line up with your actions.

If you’re learning machine learning, practice building your own project. If it breaks, build another.

If you’re writing blog posts, write more. Share more. Rewrite old ones.

If you’re streaming video games, set up a schedule, make it every day. Try a different game, ask someone who has a following to play with you.

If your side hustle isn’t earning enough for you to live yet, reduce what it costs to live. Or ask for a day off per week to build your business.

If these seem outlandish, it’s important to remember, you know the outcome of doing nothing.

Often the only factor which differentiates someone who hits the tipping point and someone who doesn’t is tenacity.