The Benefit Of Taking Action

byprofitbyjuan

751 followers

Updated 12 years ago

As you progress in WA, you will hear Carson and Kyle advise, suggest, and they probably would arm twist you if they could, to get you to take action. Start writing that article, or write that post, they will advice.

Whatever you do, TAKE ACTION NOW!

I hate to admit it, but they are right. I say I hate to admit it because I have a tendency to procrastinate. I know this is a little known malady that you folks don't suffer from. (LOL)

I beg your indulgence so I may digress with an example from outside the IM field.

This is a personal example of something that just happened today. I have immediate plans for a trip to South America, to Chile to be precise, which is the country of my birth.

My daughter, who was born here in the US, is really the force behind this trip. I have all my family, lots of them, in Southern Chile, and my daughter has never met them, even though she's past thirty years of age. She doesn't have much family here in the US, yet she has this huge family in Chile that she has never met.

So for reasons too involved to discuss here, she decided she had to travel to Chile to meet her family, and the timing is such that she wants to go now, and has invited me to come along...she's footing the bill.

Since my last trip to Chile was some 22 or 23 years ago, I found it compelling to accompany her. She purchased the tickets already under a special, discounted package.

Everything's OK, except my documentation. Since I have not been out of the US for over 20 years, my passport is expired.

I assured my daughter that was no problem, that I would only have to take a 2 hour drive from my home in San Diego, California up to Los Angeles to the nearest Consulate General of Chile where they would reissue my passport in a couple of hours right there at that office.

As you might expect, in 20 years since I last renewed my passport many things have changed, including the rules for issuing my passport. I now need at least 4 weeks to obtain a new passport, not just a couple of hours.

I guess because of the dangerous world we now live in, the government of Chile has installed the latest electronic security measures, thus they take an applicant's information at a Consular Office and transmit it to Santiago, Chile for review and issuing the actual passports.

That was all very interesting, except for the fact that I cannot receive my new passport in time for the trip. It literally scuttles the trip. My daughter will not go there without me because she doesn't feel she's fluent enough in Spanish.

So after investigation and contact with the consulate in Los Angeles, I found out that, with a lot of luck, I might be able to get my passport in time, MAY BE...

So I told my daughter I would go to Los Angeles first thing next week. You see, I felt more comfortable with a bit of procrastination...after all, it would probably not work out anyway.

That's when I got a real dose of my daughter's determination, and her predilection for taking action NOW.

She said to me "Dad, we need to go tomorrow, not next week, and leave at 6:00 AM to be in Los Angeles at 8:30 AM when the Consulate opens the door."

So we did do that, we left for Los Angeles within 12 hours of my finding out that I needed a whole month to get my documents.

Because my daughter literally forced me to take action, we left for Los Angeles early enough, and I was able to be waited on before the crow came.

Plus, after befriending the lady who was waiting on me, all my documentation and information were input into the system and electrically transmitted to Santiago.

As I was getting ready to leave the consular office, I asked my new friend if there was any way of expediting this process, after I explained why the urgency. So she said, let me get my counterpart at the Ministry in Santiago on the phone, and try to work something out.

After a 45 minute wait, she called me to the counter and told me that she had talked to the right people in Santiago, and that I should have my passport about 10 days ahead of our departure date.

And we were done at the Consular office by 11:30 AM, about 5 days ahead of when I had planned to get into action to deal with this problem.

If I had been alone, and waited till the next week, I would have lost almost a full week of the time I had, and my passport would not have been ready on time.

What saved the day was my daughter's action bias, which got me going within hours, and literally saved the trip and the cost of the expensive airline tickets.

What's moral of the story?

Action does work, and usually solves what appear like insurmountable problems.