The Key To Taking Massive Action

If you haven’t already, you should read this article by my mentor, Dan Kennedy, titled “Test And Grow Rich.”

In it, he provides this insight, among others:

All highly successful entrepreneurs view everything they do as testing.”

The recent rollout of Obamacare – and in particular the Healthcare.gov website – has been a complete and utter disaster so far.

Today, Obamacare “czar” Kathleen Sebelius is appearing in front of a congressional committee to perform the Obama administration’s all-too-familiar routine of blaming and excuse-making instead of taking responsibility for their ineptitude.

The most shocking shortcoming by the administration’s website design team that has met with near-universal criticism is the almost total lack of testing done before the site went live about a month ago.

Even though some Americans somehow believe that Obamacare will not be devastating to our nation’s economy, virtually everyone agrees that the inept administrators of the bloated legislation could have avoided a lot of shame and embarrassment by thoroughly testing the website before launching it.

But even though the very concept itself is taking center stage in American politics recently, testing has a much more important role than just avoiding epic disasters…

As the Dan Kennedy quote above suggests, having the mindset that everything is a test is the key to taking massive action for all entrepreneurs.

In contrast, having a lack of confidence and/or fear of failure will result in self-paralysis and lack of action-taking, resulting in diminished revenue and eventually, the death of the business itself.

Here’s one example…

During my three-and-a-half years as a yellow pages advertising consultant, I sat across the table from hundreds of small business owners who went through the agonizing annual ritual of wondering to themselves, “Should I run that ad in the book for the next year?”

Even when I created and designed a highly-effective new ad for them based on proven direct response marketing principles, they would still hesitate to sign the contract because of their fear and uncertainty.

Much of that anxiety could have been avoided, however, had they followed my suggestion and tested the new ad – or at least its headline and/or offer – in a far less expensive and shorter-term medium such as a small classified or Google Adwords ad.

(*And all of it was avoided for the following year once the ad was running and bringing them record profits. At that point, their only concern was how much bigger to make their ad and how many more directories to run it in.)

Here’s another example…

I’ve watched dozens of “Mastermind Group” members over the years who have cost themselves dearly in terms of both lost revenue and unnecessary worry by insisting on asking their fellow group members the same very basic questions – sometimes for months on end – such as “Which headline do you think I should use in my ad?” or any other number of issues that could all be very easily and simply solved by simply testing them.

Here’s the bottom line…

I have a saying:

I live in an AND world – not an OR world.”

That means that whenever you find yourself asking the question, “Which strategy or tactic should I use?” your answer should be “as many as I can.” Then, you simply keep the ones that work and stop the ones that don’t (while constantly continuing to test more of them!).

The key to success in business is taking massive action.

And my suggestion for you to get into the mindset of taking massive action is to wake up every day and ask yourself, “What can I test today?”

If the Healthcare.gov website builders had followed that one simple piece of advice for the past three-and-a-half years, then President Obama’s signature piece of legislation wouldn’t be quite the total disaster that it is today.

So how about your business? How do you want that to look three-and-a-half years from now? Will you take massive action, testing as many different strategies and tactics as you possibly can?