The Difference Between Motion and Action
If you don’t understand it, you’ll always be heading down the wrong path
A while back, my wife and I were talking on the phone with our daughter, who was away at college. She was struggling with one of her classes but assured us that she was asking for help — something we had always encouraged our kids to do whenever they felt stuck. She said she had sent several emails to the resource center and was trying to set up a meeting with her professor. All good, but in spite of her efforts, no one had gotten back to her.
As she relayed the story to us, I could tell she believed she had done all things that could be expected from her and was simply left to wait for the result.
I realized then what the problem was. There’s an Ernest Hemingway quote I turn to when I feel stuck: “Never mistake motion for action.” But that’s exactly what my daughter was doing.
Most people see moving through steps on their to-do lists as progress. But by focusing only on motion, you let others set the pace and define the outcome. As an entrepreneur, I’ve learned to focus on the endpoint and work backward, removing obstacles in my path or going around them.
Here’s a story of what happens when you’re so focused on motion that you neglect action: At my tech firm Ardent, we had to convince software vendors to move their applications to our unique machine architecture — a major job. I hired Jim, the vice president of marketing from a potential software partner, to oversee the project. Each week, I sat down with him to review his progress.
Our conversations went like this:
Me: Jim, how are we doing with getting Ansys ported?
Jim: Great, I have a bunch of calls into them.
Me: How are we doing on the Nastran port?
Jim: Wonderful, they said they’ll get back to me next month.
Me: How about Dyna 3D?
Jim: It’s going great, we’re on their list.
The rest of the progress report sounded just like this.
After hearing the same report for the nth week, I called a halt to the meeting. I had an executive who thought he was making progress. I thought he hadn’t done a damn thing.
One of Jim’s favorite phrases was, “I got the ball rolling with account X.” He thought that his job was the activities he was doing — making calls, setting up meetings, etc. But in fact, his real job — the action — was to get the software moved onto our machine. Everything he had done to date was just the motion to get the process rolling. And so far, the motion hadn’t accomplished anything.
When I explained this to him, the conversation got heated. “I’ve been working my tail off for the last two months!” he said. When he calmed down, I asked him how much had gotten accomplished. He started listing his activities again. I stopped him and reminded him that I could have hired anyone to set up meetings, but I had brought him in to get the software onto our machine.
“How much progress have we made to that goal?”
“Not much,” he finally admitted.
The reason why successful entrepreneurs have a reputation for being relentless is because they’re focused on action. To outsiders, it looks like they’re annoyingly persistent. The reality is that their eyes are on the prize.
Back home, my wife and I called our daughter again and declared a family “teaching moment.” We explained the difference between motion and action and asked her what else she could do to get help for the class she was struggling in. She realized she needed more persistence and creativity to get to the right person. So she followed the path of action. The next day, she was in the resource center, having figured out how to get the help she needed.
Lessons learned
- Most people execute linearly, step by step.
- They measure progress by “steps they did.”
- Entrepreneurs focus on the goal.
- They measure progress by “accomplishing their goals.”
Steve Blank writes about building successful startups at www.steveblank.com
