In science, you DO an experiment not because you know what will happen but in order to SEE what will happen.

Outside science, there is often a reluctance to do an experiment in case it doesn’t work. But no idea is of any real value until it gets used. If an idea never gets used, why even know about it?

There’s a huge gap between knowing and doing. I have called this gap – The Impossible Barrier – and written at length about this in NewSell. The reason for this is because, so often, knowing something prevents doing it. We have something repeated to us and we say ‘Yes, I already know that!’ and we turn our attention away. Yet it is the repetition of things we already know that gets us closer to actually doing it. It has been said that too often the knowers are not the doers and the doers are not the knowers.

One of the reasons that the global climate change programs have been delayed and slowed down (at great cost to the next few generations) is because the focus has shifted from the doers to the talkers. The focus has moved away from the scientists, technologists and problem-solvers to the politicians, media and the chatterati.

We need to get into action. Once we move from thought into action we immediately create feedback. Our actions have consequences and it is these consequences that enable us to evaluate the effectiveness of our behaviour. Thinking is not an escape from action it is simply the basis for it. When in doubt, do something.

According to Rochelle Myers, who ran the famous Stamford University Graduate School of Management course, Creativity in Business, questions are the following:

A question is an opening to creation.

A question is an unsettled and unsettling issue.

A question is an invitation to creativity.

A question is a beginning of adventure.

A question is a seductive foreplay.

A question pokes and prods what has not yet been poked and prodded.

A question is a point of departure. A question wants a playmate.

If you can develop your questioning skills you will immediately begin to expand your options, you will have more alternatives.

You will also generate extra possibilities, you will have more choices. All these things will lead you into action, to DO things. Your new questioning skills will enable you to become less of a knower and more of a doer. You will annoy authorities and astound your friends. This alone, can be a good enough reason to ask more questions.

In the 1980s my friend and agent, Leslie Buckland, was President of Caribiner Inc in New York, the world’s largest producer of big business meetings. Leslie often used to say, ‘If something is worth doing it’s worth doing badly’. Why? Doesn’t this seem a contradiction for a man who was known internationally for setting the high standards of quality in big business meetings?

A Caribiner production team could go into a hotel ballroom anywhere in the world, turn it into a circus or a theatre in 24 hours, stage, for one performance only, the business equivalent of a Broadway show – original music, dancers, actors, fireworks – and then strike the set leaving it as they found it 24 hours later.

They staged multi-million dollar productions all over the world for companies like IBM, McDonald’s, and Mercedes-Benz where quality was the absolute key. Yet Les often said, ‘If something is worth doing it’s worth doing badly’.  Why?

This is the paradox of action, of decision- making, of getting things done. The mistakephobiacs are so afraid of doing something badly they get nothing done at all!

‘Our doubts’, said William Shakespeare, ‘are traitors and make us lose the good we might win by fearing to attempt’.