Name: Life rewards Action, not Intelligence | Conor Neill | Leadership
Uploaded: 2025-02-04T23:58:38.000Z
Duration: 5 min 4 s
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Past simple

Took me a few years growing up to really learn this.

I think my sense in school was I did quite well on exams just through intelligence without having to do a lot of work.

And for me, when I was quite young, I valued intelligence over action.

I think one of the dangers is smart people, that the smarter you are, the better your excuses.

The more accomplished you are in talking yourself out of taking action, in proving to yourself that every action that you could take is too small, too meaningless, and not worth it.

And George Leonard, who brought jiu-jitsu from Japan to the US, one of the things he said is absolutely you cannot do everything, but you can do one thing, and another, and another.

And that's the way you make massive progress in life, by doing one thing, and another, and another.

This idea that life rewards action, not intelligence.

This YouTube channel, very often I sit down and think, you know, these ideas, they're not particularly deep or wise.

But what makes this channel grow, what makes you come and connect is, I guess the ideas aren't terrible, but I show up and I share them.

And the matter that you show up and try and act week after week, month after month, year after year, with a little bit of intelligence, you start to get better and better and better.

So this thing, even if the action is poor action, you're gonna learn something from it.

And it's so easy to talk yourself out of action, but it's so important to remember that life rewards action, not intelligence, not smarts in your brain, but action into the world.

And discipline is necessary in our life in order to generate consistent, systematic action.

But I think until you measure something that matters, you do not know if you're disciplined.

And perhaps for me, the time that I learned this most was when Iese, my mentor here in the early days as a teacher at Iese, Brian Leggett, would ask me if I would do some writing, just write a few technical notes.

And months passed, years passed, and I just wasn't making progress.

And for one year, I had a call every Wednesday with a writing coach.

And every call would begin with him asking one question, how many words did you write this week?

And he pushed me to measure how many words I wrote each day, how many words I wrote each week.

It felt like I was putting a lot of energy into writing.

But the actual number of words being produced day after day, week after week was very low.

And it was only when I really got this measure and made sure that I looked at this measure each morning, each day, each evening, each week, each session with my coach, that I started to realize that so much of the effort was in my head and not turning into words on a page.

And it's only when you measure something that really clarifies whether you're getting the actions done that you start to realize whether you have discipline or not.

So be very careful in evaluating your discipline, your capacity to turn ideas into action by some measure of whether you feel like you're making an effort.

Because your mind will cheat you into believing you're being really busy, you're being really, putting a lot of effort.

The feeling in me was I was putting a lot of time and a lot of effort and a lot of energy into writing.

But those early weeks seeing that it was resulting in so few words being written.

A video is a very clear measure of whether you've finished something or not.

So again, reminder this week, life rewards action, not intelligence.

Action leads you to grow, leads you to engage with others.

Action, everything good in life happens when you're off the sofa and engaging with the world.

So my hope for you this week is find a measure of something that matters.

Pay attention to whether you're making progress on the actions that lead to that measure.

And look at what needs to happen in your discipline so that you value action above thinking or intending to take action.

So have a good one, it's Conor here at the ESA Business School here in Barcelona, teaching a three-day programme to a group of wonderful senior executives this week.

Have a great one, thank you for your likes, your comments, your questions.

Keeps me coming back, making these videos.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Life rewards Action, not Intelligence | Conor Neill | Leadership

discipline

articulate

massive

engage