I like to highlight a very inspiring - and deeply insightful - quotation from Tony Robbins:

"The difference between those who succeed and those who fail isn't what they have - it's what they choose to see and do with their resources and experiences of life."

There are four key words or phrases, namely:

(1) choose to see...;

(2) (choose to)... do;

(3) ... resources;

(4) ... experiences of life;

Knowledge is not measured by what you have read from a book or gotten from a casual conversation or even from attending a seminar or workshop. This is only potential, or what is precisely stored in your head.

Interestingly, nowadays, there are a lot of fascinating seminars and workshops out in the marketplace.

Some are even available online.

I have often come across intelligent folks attending these seminars or workshops, and they often get caught by the in-class euphoria with other attendees, especially when the class environment is designed to be touchy-feely, and when these emotionally charged-up folks return to their workplaces, it's always back to square one, after they are left much to their personal devices.

What happens then? They start off with another or upgraded versions of the same seminar or workshop, and thus the vicious cycle continues, finally ending as, sad to say, seminar junkies.

I often get emails from friends-I-have-not-met in cyberspace, seeking my professional advice after having read my Amazon reviews and/or my personal weblogs.

Once I have reviewed their "problems", it then dawn on me that there are in fact intelligent folks out there who actually don't know how to convert their knowledge into action.

Naturally, this spell good business opportunities for those seminar or workshop purveyors.

I hate to say this: It's your executive productivity - what you actually do and what you don't - in the real world out there, that ultimately determines whether your knowledge is power.

To use an apt analogy, knowledge is indicated horsepower of an automobile. True or brake horsepower comes about when your rubber tyres meet the road.

Business strategists like to use the term, "execution premium" to denote the outcome.

For plain folks like us, it's simply making a decision, setting out a plan, putting all ideas to work, keeping track, obtaining feedback and monitoring progress, in our life or where we work or in our business.

The key to it is basically developing concrete action, or better still, sustained traction.

Creativity or rather coming up with many ideas is one thing - in fact, it's easy, but no action, talk only (that's NATO for short), still puts us back into inertia.

All ideas must be followed by - or rather converted - into action, plain and simple, even though putting ideas to work is oftentimes a laborious and tough task.

In real-world terms, and against my background as an engineer, I often like to call the endgame as creating "concrete deliverables" from your pet ideas.

The harsh reality is this: only Action produces Results.

I recall entrepreneur Nolan Bushnell, who founded both Atari, Inc., and the Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza-Time Theaters chain, has summed up best my sentiment:

"Everyone who's ever taken a shower has had an idea. It's the person who gets out of the shower, dries off and does something about it who makes the difference."