When it comes to your financial future and your financial success, actions speak louder than words. Many people talk about leaving yachting with enough money to help them fund the next stage of their life. But relatively few turn the words into deeds.

It’s not just superyacht crew. Everyone’s life is littered with unfulfilled goals. Some of their goals were more important than others. Some they might regret not reaching, others not so much. But why is it that saying we’ll do something so often results in nothing happening at all?

At the core of the problem is motivation, or a lack of it. Because getting motivated to take action is often hard, even when the outcome for us is hugely positive.

Why is turning words into action so hard?

If you were standing on railway tracks with an oncoming train hurtling towards you from a few hundred metres away, you would say to yourself, “I will get out of the way.” And you’d do just that. Because the consequences of not doing it are severe and permanent.

In other words, you are motivated to take action by the negative impact of not taking action. 

You are even more motivated by the need to take action very quickly, because the impact of the train is imminent. So you’re not going to hang about. By contrast, if the train is far away, a mere speck on the horizon, you’d recognise the danger but you might be a bit more relaxed and take your time getting out of the way.

And what if the train is so far away you can’t even see it? You may not feel that you have to get off the tracks at all. You might say you want to get off the tracks, but there’s no rush, so you don’t.

So imminent negative consequences are a powerful motivator. They turbocharge the transformation of your words into action. Negative consequences that are further away in the future lose some of their motivational influence on you.

Positive outputs driven by negative inputs

What about positive consequences? Are they any more powerful?

Ironically, taking action to secure an immediate positive outcome is often driven by a negative sentiment: fear of missing out (FOMO). Plenty of marketing and advertising is based on that model. A prime example is Black Friday, when retailers offer heavy price cuts for a limited time only in a bid to boost sales. People hate missing out on a deal. In other words, people say to themselves, “If I don’t do this now, I’ll miss out. I’d hate to miss out.” So they take action.

Then there is the demon of instant gratification. When there is no waiting involved, people are more inclined to do what they say because they will be rewarded immediately.

However, if the positive consequences of taking action are pushed away into the future, they lose nearly all of their motivational impact in the present. And the further away the reward is, the less likely it is that people will take action today.

Future outcomes are invisible

The problem is that future outcomes are abstract. You have to imagine them. Getting out of the way of a real train that’s almost on top of you is a no-brainer compared with stepping off the rails for a train you can’t even see yet.

Worse still, our motivation drops even further if we feel that the actions we have to take to achieve an abstract future goal are ‘hard’. Or that they will somehow have a negative impact on us in the present.

Examples:

If you want to lose weight, you have to eat healthier and drink less. Where’s the fun in that?

If you want to be fitter, you have to exercise more. But exercise is exhausting.

If you want to pass an exam, you have to study more. And that means watching less Netflix.

Or:

If I want to have financial freedom in the future, I have to invest and save money today. Frankly, I’d rather spend it on enjoying myself now.

It’s almost like humans are hardwired against sacrificing something in the present for a beneficial outcome in the future.

The promise of money tomorrow isn’t enough 

Right now, you have the opportunity to take action so that you have several hundred thousand dollars waiting for you when you leave yachting. Everyone who works on board a superyacht has that very same opportunity. So did everyone who served on board before you and has since left the industry.

Question: how many yachties do you know who left yachting with several hundred thousand dollars in their bank account?

Our guess is you can count them on one hand. You probably only need one or two fingers.

Follow-up question: would you like to leave yachting with several hundred thousand dollars?

Our guess is you would love that.

We’re also confident that you would even say you would take action to make that happen. Unfortunately, most people preface their intentions to take action with:

“At some stage…”

“One day…”

“Eventually…”

“After the season is finished…”

The action gets deferred to some vague point in the future. Because human beings are also very good at doing that. We feel that saying that we are going to do something is as good as actually doing it. Even though we all know that’s not true.

So how do we get beyond just saying the words?

How to make things happen

Firstly, you need to recognise that you are in control.

When you speak to people about the thing they said they were going to do, they’ll have plenty of reasons why they haven’t done it yet — all of which will be linked to outside forces beyond their control.

“Something came up…”

“Something got in the way…”

“Somebody else didn’t do what they said they would…”

“Somebody else made it difficult…”

“Circumstances changed…”

What you won’t hear is someone say, “I didn’t do it, because I didn’t take action.” Because that puts themselves at the heart of the reason why another dream has fallen by the wayside. And nobody wants to blame themselves. Much better if the blame can be shifted onto someone else.

Don’t fall into that trap. Yes, things will always happen in life that are outside of your control. But very few of them will permanently derail your plans. How you respond to events outside of your control will have a big say in how successful you are in life. Fortunately, how you respond to setbacks or obstacles is within your control.

That’s tremendously powerful, because it means you can decide which direction your life takes, rather than giving over control of it to random events and the whims of other people.

Knowing you are in control of how you respond also means you can’t honestly tell yourself that not achieving your goal was the fault of someone else. Once you take other people out of the equation, you’re left with you. 

Good news: you are the person you can rely on the most to take action to benefit you.

Bad news: you already know you can be the most unreliable one too.

Overcoming you, your own worst enemy

You’re going to need some tools to move you from saying to doing. The first of those is setting yourself a deadline.

There’s a saying that goes, “A goal is a dream with a deadline.” It suggests that adding a deadline to your words will help you take action.

It won’t.

People miss deadlines all the time. Because:

“I have plenty of time to get around to doing this, so I won’t start just yet.”

“I have other things I need to do first.”

“It looks like a lot of work and I don’t have space to do it at the moment.”

And so on.

So what good is a deadline you set yourself if it is so easy to ignore?

Deadlines give your goals an anchor, an end date. This is a vital first step. From a deadline, you can work your way back to where you are now. You can start planning the actions you need to take to make your goal a reality by your chosen deadline. You can break your actions down into bitesize pieces and schedule them.

Beware: all of these things can look like you are taking action. But really what you are doing is turning spoken words into written words. They are still words. You haven’t achieved anything yet.

But you are in a better place to start taking action.

Or better still, you’re in a better place to get others to take action for you.

Never keep the ball in your court

Of course, you’ll have to take some action yourself if you want to achieve your goals. But you don’t have to do it all alone. In fact, for most goals, you should let other people do the heavy lifting.

You can do this in two ways.

Firstly, by literally letting them do the work. For instance, when you start on your financial journey, you don’t need to make the plan alone. That’s what financial planners are for. They (we) take the burden off your shoulders. We talk to you about your goals, dreams and ambitions in life (one of the best and most exciting conversations you’ll ever have, by the way). 

Then we take that information and turn it into an actionable financial plan. It has an outcome, a deadline and actions that need to be taken. Many of which we help you take. Your job is to do the few things that only you can do and bat the ball back to us. 

It’s important that you never keep the ball in your court. Always make sure the people helping you can move forward. Return the ball to their side of the court as quickly as possible. 

That way, they can get on with things while you go about your daily life. Because once you walk up the gangway at the start of the season, you won’t have much, if any, time and energy to focus on your own goals until you walk down it again at the end of the season.

In other words, make the deadline and the scheduled steps the responsibility of some trustworthy professionals, whose goal in life is to help you achieve your goal in life. Their motivation is that helping you is what pays their bills. It’s also what they’ve chosen to do in life. You’ll find service providers in all aspects of your life who want to help you succeed in your ambitions.

Commit to the goal by committing to a partner

The second way in which other people can help you is by being your partner in what you want to achieve. That doesn’t mean they share in the outcome, by the way. Instead, these are people whose job it is to keep you on track.

For example, you want to learn another language. You could do this using an app like Duolingo. But that means you have to make yourself do the lessons. The ball is constantly in your court.

Or, instead of an app, you could hire a tutor. Now you’re in a partnership. You’ve committed to learning the language; they’ve committed to teaching you. You’ll have time scheduled together and you’ll be letting not only yourself but them down too if you don’t turn up. Not only that, they’ll be in touch to make sure you turn up. And once you’re in the lesson, they’ll make sure you do the work. You no longer have to motivate yourself. The tutor acts as your surrogate motivation. They will help you get the ball out of your court.

We offer that kind of partnership to our clients too. We see ourselves not just as financial planners, but financial coaches as well. Our job is not only to help you set your goal, your deadline and draw up a plan of action, we also make sure you take action when you need to.

TLDR: the shortcut to action

Talking alone doesn’t get anything done. Action gets things done.

You are in control and you need to drive the action.

Action is dependent on motivation, but motivation is easily weakened.

A goal is meaningless without a deadline. A deadline is meaningless without a schedule. A schedule is meaningless without action.

Find partners who can share the workload.

Keep the ball in your partner’s court as much as possible.

Take action today.