5 Reasons Why People Fail In Executing Their Ideas And How You Could Succeed (2024)

We all have many ideas about many different things, some of them might be very important while some are not.Importance doesn’t matter when it comes to ideas, our lives aren’t entirely made up of the most important ideas, sometimes the ones that seem unimportant ones are what makes the difference.

However, one really important thing about ideas is that, they are of zero value unless they are executed.Just having an idea cannot get you anything, in order to get something out of it, you need to go out and execute it.So if kept unexecuted, every idea has zero value no matter how important they seem to be.

Executing ideas might sound easy, but this is really the hardest part. Most people think this is easy because they believe in the myth that you need a carefully crafter plan or a crystal clear idea before you set out to do anything in life. So, people are so busy in planning and refining their ideas that they get stuck and will never get a chance to even start the execution process.

But listen, getting stuck while trying to perfect their ideas is just one reason why people fail toexecuting their ideas. Here I have brought together the five most common reasons why people fail in the process of executing their ideas. So lets jump in.

This is really common, we all would have experienced it at some point in our lives. For example when you thought of taking that risk that would make you outstanding among your colleagues but backed up at the last moment because you were feared about the public embarrassment that you would have to face if you fail to achieve it.

Sometimes the chance for such an outcome would be less than fifty percent but even then you are not ready to take that risk because you have become so comfortable in doing things with a perfectly predictable outcome and are so scared to try anything with some inherent risk in it.

So how are you going to overcome that fear of unknown outcomes? The first thing to do is to understand that great things does not happen in your comfort zone. The New York Times bestselling author and former CEO of Thomas Nelson publishers, Michael Hyatt, use to say that there are three zones in life: The comfort zone, the discomfort zone and the delusional zone.

The comfort zone is the cozy and comfortable place, where you just sit doing the same thing again and again, staying on the same place, making no progress whatsoever.

The discomfort zone is the home of the risk takes, the adventurous folks who are constantly enthusiastic about trying out new things. This is where the most productivity happens.

The third one, the so called delusional zone is where the non-practical and illusionistic people live. This is the place for the people who overestimate what they could achieve, often setting goals that has a very little or no chance of achieving. Such people get easily overwhelmed by the amount of failure and are more probable to quit early.

Michael Hyatt says that you have to be in the exact middle of these zones i.e. In the discomfort zone, where you would always be adventurous and enthusiastic about trying out new things. This is where the most productivity happens. So just train yourself in handling risk and facing failure, always try to do things that scare you, that’s the only way to overcome your fear of unknown outcomes.

This is also a very common reason why people are afraid of taking risks. Almost everyone has this fear. Most of us are trying to get other’s approval in doing almost everything because we are deeply concerned about other people’s thoughts about us. This is also one of the biggest reasons why we are afraid to fail, most of us would be okay with failing in private (i.e. When no one is watching you), however, when failure becomes embarrassing is when other people come to know about it. That’s totally true, we are afraid of losing what we have got, not because we fear the loss but because we fear what other people will think about that loss we had.

We are so concerned in protecting what we have got, that we never bother to realize the fact that no one would be able to reach where they want to be if they aren’t ready to sacrifice what they have got.

No matter what you do, if you want to get to the next level, you should be willing to sacrifice what you have got. You cannot step into the shoes of that ideal version of you, that you dreams about, unless you are willing to remove the shoes that you have got right now.

So the best way to get out of the fear of what others think, is to cultivate self-confidence, to believe in yourself instead of believing in other people. Always remember that no one else has a better insight into your life and thoughts other than yourself, so the person who best knows the decisions that you need to make in your life is you. So don’t allow yourself to be influenced by the criticisms of others, always believe in yourself and your decisions.

Failure is a part of every adventurous move that we make, it is not at all necessary that you should get it on the first attempt. In fact, the people who get things (with some amount of luck) right at the first attempt are more likely to fail in the future than a person who made it up there after a couple of failures. This is because, when you fail and try it again and again, you are building a strong foundation for your craft. This is why most of the highly successful artists, writers and entrepreneurs started with humble failures.

You can’t just take the resolution of being a writer today and publish a New York Times bestseller the next month (you can theoretically, but the possibilities are too narrow). Everybody starts from small, and every successful person would have learned his or her lessons from failures. So don’t fear failure, It’s just another part of the process.

One interesting thing about failure is that it could sometimes make us blind.Every time we set goals and fall short of our deadline, we all focus on how much we fell short. This is dangerous when it comes to your self-confidence. For most of us, this will make us blindly ignore the progress we had made and just worry about what we didn’t make. This can terribly ruin your self confidence.

The next time you set some goal and fail, don’t think about what you didn’t make or how much you fell short, instead, focus on what you did achieve and how you could improve upon it.

Another way of putting this is: ‘the lack of determination’. It is said that, “If we do what we love, we will never feel it as work”, but is that true? Yes, it is. However, the problem is that our brains care more about the things that are necessary than the things that we love, that is true for everyone, the human brain is made that way. Our brains prioritise necessary things over the things that we love.

Have you ever felt that you want to be a writer but is unable to consistently publish a blog post on your blog every week? Writing a blog post just takes around an hour. So, you weren’t able to complete it, not because you didn’t had an hour to spare the entire week but because you had other things that had a higher priority than your writing and you devoted all ofyour time to those task, which led to procrastinating your writing.

So what can we do to get rid of that procrastinating mentality? Just make a commitment. Make your writing a necessity. This will help you increase the priority for your writing.

I started to write persistently when I found that I am pouring more money into my writing and blogging that if I don’t immediately find a way to make it pay for its own, everything will come collapsing down.

So its not completely about loving something, it’s about making it a necessity. That’s the only way to avoid being unable to do persistent work.

Before I say anything about this I want to make one thing clear, “You don’t need to have a very complex plan to do something great, you just need a basic idea and you just have to start somewhere”. I talked about this in the first episode of our audio blog series. You can hear the recording here:

So, in that recording above I talked about why ideas are of zero value unless executed. That’s true, an idea for itself cannot get you anything, when it becomes valuable is when it is executed. But the truth is that most of the people never get to the point of execution because they are stuck with perfecting their plans.

Over-planning can not only make you stuck, it can also make you lose focus on the big picture and get caught up in small term goals and problems. Making detailed plans will turn into some kind of downer when you start doing the work because reality will be always be different from what you have planned and you will never be able to strictly follow an inflexible plan.

Planning is just to get you a basic idea of your journey towards your goal, so it should always be flexible. You must be able to alter it from time to time making it better and to make your journey faster.

So these are the five reasons why people fail in executing their ideas:

· Fear of unknown outcomes

· Fear of what others might think

· Unable to handle continuous failure

· Unable to do persistent work

· Over-planning things

The first one, the fear of unknown outcomes can be eliminated if you make yourself comfortable in trying out new things and being adventurous in the discomfort zone.

The second one, the fear of what others might think, can be avoided by realizing that no one else had a better insight into your life than you yourself, therefore you should believe more in yourself that in other people.

The third one, being unable to handle persistent failure, can be avoided by realizing that no one has ever got successful without learning from their failures. Even if someone achieved success without any failure, it won’t be permanent, the chances that he or she might fail in their next attempt is very high. So by failing you are in fact solidifying the foundation for your craft.

The fourth one, being unable to do persistent work can be overcome by increasing the necessity of the things that you love (which should also be the thing that you need to get done). By doing this our brain will automatically increase the priority of these things, which will in turnhelp us to avoid procrastination.

The fifth and the final thing, Over-planning things, can be avoided by literally cutting short the “planning” part (yes, that’s exactly what you need to do). See planning as just a way to give you a basic idea of the journey towards your goal. So, instead of wasting time creating more and more complex plans just get up and start executing it.

So that’s the five things, if you found that useful, do share it with a friend who could get some value out of it. Also, take this free gift below.

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