3-Minute Read

Somewhere, a competitor just did the thing you're still thinking about.

In 1962, a 24-year-old walked into a distributor's office in Kobe, Japan, holding a business school paper about importing Japanese running shoes and nothing else. No funding. No company. No customers.

When the executives asked who he represented, he invented a name on the spot: Blue Ribbon Sports. It didn't exist yet.

He got the distributor agreement anyway. Then he spent two years making the invention true: incorporating the company, filling the first order out of the trunk of his car, selling shoes at track meets. That young man was Phil Knight. That company became Nike.

Reckless? Or exactly what it takes to build something real?

Phil wasn't figuring it out. He was working it out. One happens in your head. The other happens in motion, and only one of them builds a company.

This issue of The Grip shows you where you're doing the first one while calling it the second, and what it actually costs you to keep the difference blurry.

Figuring it out feels responsible, and to a point, it is. I’m not arguing against a measure of research and preparation. But prolonged information gathering and number crunching often become a comfortable substitute for action. It stops preparing you. It starts stunting you.

Figuring it out happens in your head: modeling, rehearsing, researching. It’s your survival brain's way of controlling the future without taking any risk. It has a knowledge ceiling; your current thinking has no access to what you don’t know you don’t know.

Founders rarely call it hiding. They call it waiting on the market, the timing, or the team to line up before they move. But all that is just code for procrastination.

And notice this: the longer you stay in it, the more anxious, foggy, and tired you get, while the actual problem or opportunity sits untouched.

Working it out happens in motion. You commit, you act, you run into what you couldn't have predicted, and you adjust from there. The path gets built while you're walking it. That's where the resources and doors you didn't know existed start to show up.

Working it out looks like the client you take on before you feel ready. The project you commit to not knowing how you’ll fulfill it. The offer you pitch that you haven't yet built. It's messier and more public than figuring it out ever is, and that's the point: you can't adjust to a market you haven't entered or learn from a conversation you haven't had.

Both modes take effort. Only one of them materially moves you forward.

Figuring it out is the realm of concept. Working it out is the realm of direct experience, where ideas become tangible. These three questions can help you surface where you may be unintentionally stuck in figuring it out:

Readiness. Change. Courage. Confidence. All of these live on the other side of action. The longer you delay action, the longer you delay everything it produces.

In 2007, Brian Chesky and his roommate, Joe Gebbia, were struggling to pay rent. So they tried something to generate extra money. During a large conference in town where hotel rooms were filling up fast, they put three air mattresses on the floor of their apartment and offered visitors a place to stay, including breakfast. They called it AirBed & Breakfast. They got three customers.

They had no business plan or projected metrics. No validation that it would work. Just a potential solution to a real problem and a willingness to test it. That action turned their idea into material reality, and gave life to Airbnb.

If you’ve been spinning in prolonged preparation, here’s your way forward:

Pick the one thing you've been figuring out the longest—the decision, the conversation, the pivot, the launch. Take the smallest real action on it today. Not the plan for the action. The action itself.

Make the offer, the pitch, the request. Put your idea in front of clients. In front of investors. Ask for help. Move.

Action is the best antidote to fear I know. Move, and the anxiety decreases. Anxiety doesn't resolve with more thinking. It resolves with movement. Don’t believe me; test it.

Waiting for circumstances to change before you act is often just fancy delay. New action creates new circumstances, not the other way around. The circumstances you're waiting for are downstream of the action you have yet to take.

Stop figuring it out. Start working it out.

Keep creating.