The Action Challenge

I love learning, thinking, and writing.

My notebooks are awash with ideas, filled to the brim with frameworks, and stuffed with more plans than I could count. If I am interested in something, I’ve no doubt spent time learning about it, thinking about it, and probably writing about it. Whether we’re at trivia night, a coaching call, or having deep philosophical discussions over dinner, I’ll be ready to talk about it with passion, preparation, and conviction.

Needless to say, I love ideas. But ideas alone are not enough to change the world; this is something I remind myself every day.

Because, like many others, I am often guilty of using thinking as a substitute for doing.

That is a dangerous gap to leave unaddressed. Today, let’s challenge ourselves to close it.

Watch The Gap

We live in a time of extraordinary access to information (and misinformation).

The push to think about and articulate our values is (thankfully) making its way into the mainstream.

Our awareness of all that needs to change is continually being expanded by the barrage of catalyzing events and the evermore obvious failures of our system.

And yet, there remains an enormous gap between what many of us believe and what we do.

In order to close that gap, we need to understand why it happens.

The Comfort Trap

“I come to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.”

• Lucille Clifton

If you are someone who doesn’t roll their eyes when the subject of “White Supremacy” is brought up, you are probably the type willing to learn about some quiet but nefarious ideas it has embedded in our culture.

The “right to comfort” is the term used to describe a pervasive and subtle entitlement to emotional and psychological ease. It leads people to avoid conflict or discomfort, and to shy away from challenging conversations — particularly about racism, inequality, and systemic problems. Paired with binary thinking (either/or), perfectionism, and other invisible values we inherit from the world around us, it’s no wonder we often don’t take action.

We’re probably just not ready, and we don’t want to do something when we’re not ready, right?

It’s why we read about injustice and feel genuinely moved. We watch a documentary about the climate and feel viscerally alarmed. We nod along to a framework for becoming a better leader and think, “yes, that’s exactly right, I should do that.” But then, when our emotional reaction has faded, and our social media post has fallen out of the feed, nothing else happens.

Waiting For Ourselves

Thinking is free. Planning is free. Intentions are free. Action costs something –– time, effort, attention, social risk, financial resources, or some combination of all of them.

All of that leaves many of us waiting for the “right moment.”

We are waiting for that future version of ourselves to show up and do the hard thing for us. The one that feels more ready, more certain, more prepared, better-resourced, less busy, etc.

But they are not coming. That mythical readiness you might be looking for almost always comes after you begin –– not before.

We have to become who we need to be now and take action. Because none of our other commitments become real until we do something.

The Action Challenge

We’ve spent the last nine weeks building up to this moment. Everything we’ve explored –– responsibility, protection, self-sacrifice, resilience, courage, empathy, compassion, vulnerability, and honesty –– has been preparation to do something.

The final commitment in the Superhero Code is Action.

In order to create real change, especially in service of these other commitments, I must take action to move beyond words and ideas.

For this challenge, I want you to find something that has been sitting in your head –– an intention, a plan, a conviction –– that has not yet made it into the world.

Like all of the previous challenges, I don’t want you to get stuck on some massive, complex undertaking. Pick something you already know matters and that is within reach. Something you’ve almost done.

Then do these three steps:

Step 1: Name it.

Be specific about the thing you will do. If it’s vague, it’s a sign that you want to be comfortable, to let yourself off the hook, to let perfectionism keep you from taking action.

Write it down. Just naming it with precision is itself a small act –– it’s a step to remove the soft cushion of abstraction that inaction hides behind.

Step 2: Reduce it to the smallest possible first move

Overwhelm can keep us from doing what needs to be done. The full scope of any problem worth confronting can be daunting. So, just make it smaller.

Find the first move. The one action that, if taken, would make the second action possible.

Step 3: Do it…TODAY

I’m serious about this timeline. I don’t think I’ve posed this level of urgency in any previous challenge. But on this one, it matters.

Don’t finish reading this post with an intention.

“By golly, I’m going to do something later this week!”

No, if you’re going to do this challenge, I’m giving you a hard deadline: before today is over. If you’re reading this at night, then you can start first thing in the morning.

And another thing: tell someone what you’re going to do. Do that right now. Send me a message or write it in the comments.

I think you will find that social contracts can be surprisingly effective.

Action and the Other Nine

Every single challenge we’ve worked through in this series was pointing here.

• Responsibility asks: what will you claim?
• Protection asks: who will you defend?
• Courage asks: what will you face?
• Action asks: what will you do about all of it?

Each of the prior commitments ensure that when you do act, you act well. It asks you to become someone who takes courageous, honest, compassionate, empathetic, vulnerable, resilient, responsible action with a willingness to make sacrifices of oneself in service of protecting others.

That sounds like a Superhero to me. And we need superheroes now more than ever.

We cannot wait for someone else to fix what we see is broken. We cannot count on the institutions, leaders, or systems that are already failing us to suddenly self-correct. The evidence does not support that level of faith.

We are at a moment in history when the people who take action are, in a very real sense, the ones who determine what happens next.

Go be the one who helps determine what happens next.

I hope you enjoyed this post!

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