Stop thinking and start doing

I just read a post on Zac Johnson’s site this morning, and it brought back a thought I had last year. 

Last year I was thinking about how my T-shirt Shop had been going.  I made major adjustments at the end of March last year, and launched and built a new website around the overhaul.  This did end up paying dividends, and it took me about 2 weeks of work to get it up and working.  Turns out, not long after I loaded about 3 or 4 hundred extra designs on my shop, CafePress instituted a limit on the size of shops.  They put the limit around 400, but grandfathered everyone who had bigger shops.  Since I had just loaded like 400 designs, I was well over the limit and thus extended a limit that would allow me another 300 or so.   I was so glad that I had uploaded those designs and was now allowed to have a big shop. 

I quit just letting the shop sit there, and actually did something about it.  I also played with the HTML code (not too much, but I did try) a little and learned a few more things from reading the forums.  Bottom line is that before I made those changes I was thinking to myself “Why didn’t I load all of this stuff up the year before?”  I had all of these ideas and have a list of designs to put up, but just never took the time to do one a day or two a day or 5 on the weekends. 

Zac’s post about stopping all the wishing and thinking and starting the doing, I think is a dead on article that a lot of us should read.  You can’t play like Tiger Woods if the only time you even think about golf is when you are watching him at the Masters. 

So where did that “DOING” get me over the course of a year? Prior to the point of the change, I was selling about 5 shirts a month which paid for the monthly fee and then some.  On the big months I might be at about 10 shirts due to holidays.  After this change I started getting about 10 sales a month, which have more or less continued for the last year.  That 2 weeks of work basically doubled the yearly sales.  Although I still have a huge list of stuff to put on the shop, I have in the mean time launched 6 blogs, built 2 others for family, built another website for a fee, and several other projects.  These all helped increase my knowledge of what is out there and how to use a lot of tools. 

I am learning much more from DOING than I was 5 years ago from reading and thinking about doing. 
—What did I learn today?  I learned how to make my “Full Archive” button at the bottom of the site work.   A lot of Googling, reading and testing.

What say you?  Do you learn better from DOING or thinking and formulating?

Johnny Optimist