Tom Chi, one of my dear friends and inventor of Google Glass, preaches in his rapid prototyping workshops that “doing is the best kind of thinking.”
I wholeheartedly agree and have seen this play out in real life many times: Instead of intellectually debating an idea, it is typically much better to simply take the first step and build a very (VERY) rough prototype – the act of building and later exposing your prototype to potential customers yields significantly more profound insights and leads to validated learning whereas talking only leads to theoretical knowledge.
With this in mind I recently had a conversation with a highly accomplished entrepreneur, now working for a Fortune 500 company, who shared the following insight with me:
Action leads to insight more often than insight leads to action.
Two sides of the same coin. With this in mind – get out there and start doing! Companies are not built in PowerPoint or Excel (well, Google Docs these days) but by getting your arms deep into the machine and your hands dirty.