Goals And Paralysis By Analysis

There is a symptom known within Internet marketing circles as "paralysis by analysis," though this symptom can and does apply to all types of goals and/or stressful scenarios. This affliction is caused when a person overanalyzes an issue to the point where he or she freezes either out of fear of making the wrong move or out of a desire to continue searching until they find the "perfect" solution for their goal or problem.

Self-education is a wonderful thing, but there comes a point where you can use education as a crutch for your inaction rather than a tool to help you achieve your goals. The quest for perfection is honorable, but it can slowly consume you and prevent you from spending time on more important actions or goals.

I've long been a fan of the Apprentice television show – the reality television portion of it doesn't do much for me, but I enjoy watching teams of people perform business tasks. Watching various forms of management (both successful and failed) helps me hone my own management skills. Anyhow, during the second season there was an extremely intelligent individual that had nearly ten years of higher education. On paper he was an extremely qualified candidate to run a business.

He was fired.

Why? As Donald Trump pointed out, there was no doubt the fellow was smart as a whip and highly educated, but while all of his peers had already taken action and entered the business world with decent degrees of success, he instead remained within colleges to pick up more and more degrees in hopes of eventually converting his expansive education into a solid career. Trump's stance was that he was wasting years of his life away in pursuit of further education rather than taking his already solid educational foundation and converting it into action: a business career.

While I don't agree with everything that Trump has said or done on his television show, I absolutely agreed with his assessment in this case. Education is worthless unless a person has the ambition to convert it into action.

When developing financial or other complex personal goals you do not want to make the mistake of jumping head-first without the proper knowledge or skills, but you also don't want to analyze a situation so long that you never seem to make the first step. It's far better to take a slightly less educated step forward than it is to hold your feet back in fear that the step will be the wrong one.

Technically, it's very difficult to make an actual mistake when you take a step forward towards achieving your goals. If your step is successful, you're closer than you once were. If your step is unsuccessful, at least you tried and you now have a valuable indication of what didn't work so that you can adjust your plan and try again. Either way, you are already far ahead of the game when compared to someone that studies, studies and studies some more, yet is too afraid to actually leap into the game.

The reality is most goals can be achieved with a huge dose of ambition and a minor dose of education. Initiative is more important than knowledge, because all the college degrees in the world won't help you if you don't take the first active step forward.

So study up on your goals, but don't analyze your options so much that you become paralyzed or you'll never find the perfect solution and/or achieve them.