You must fail to succeed. Thinking is not enough. You must apply.

A couple of excerpts from Tony Retrosi's blogpost, 10 painfully obvious truths:

4. Some kind of failure always occurs before success.
Most mistakes are unavoidable. Learn to forgive yourself. It’s not a problem to make them. It’s only a problem if you never learn from them.
If you’re too afraid of failure, you can’t possibly do what needs to be done to be successful. The solution to this problem is making friends with failure. You want to know the difference between a master and a beginner? The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried. Behind every great piece of art is a thousand failed attempts to make it, but these attempts are simply never shown to us. I was listening to the Freakonomics podcast the other day:
LEVITT: I always tell my students — fail quickly. The quicker you fail the more chances you have to fail at something else before you eventually maybe find the thing that you don’t fail at.

A zen parable comes to mind:

This guy was a well-known Taoist painter, and some rather important official commissioned him to draw him a cat. The painter asked him to return sometime later for the work. The official came back the next day but was told it wasn’t done, so he came back the next week, and the next, then the following month, then that next month…

This went on for about a year, the official wanting just the one drawing of just one darn cat he’d asked for way too long ago, and the painter asking him to return another time. Finally, the official came again for his cat, and the painter sat down at his desk, picked up his brush, and with one single stroke drew a truly spectacular swish of a cat.

The official was… not too happy. He was more surprised than upset, spluttering something about the wait and why didn’t the painter just do that the first day?  The painter apologized that he couldn’t have.

He then stood and opened the door to his cupboard. Out spilled hundreds upon hundreds of drawings of practice cats.

Previously posted

5. Thinking and doing are two very different things.
Success never comes to look for you while you wait around thinking about it.
You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do. Knowledge is basically useless without action. Good things don’t come to those who wait; they come to those who work on meaningful goals. Ask yourself what’s really important and then have the courage to build your life around your answer.
And remember, if you wait until you feel 100% ready to begin, you’ll likely be waiting the rest of your life.