Some people love to dream and plan. They may also take the occasional half-hearted action. They will probably fail to achieve their dreams.

However, they are much further along the road than those who no longer dream or plan and who have settled for a boring but comfortable existence.

The difference between dreaming and taking action is not as clear cut as we might think. Perhaps some kinds of action are just less obvious than others. Perhaps regular dreaming is a kind of action which is more powerful than we realize.

Others love to take obvious action in pursuit of their dreams. They are itching to start moving and getting on with things.

They may have a better chance of success than those who are just dreamers because they may accidentally take the right actions or, at least, they will have the opportunity to learn from their mistakes!

However, they often fail for lack of forethought and planning and exhaust themselves in a flurry of activity as they busy themselves with second priority projects and even totally unnecessary tasks.

It makes sense, then, to dream and list our priorities and to take action as well.

Action does not always mean physical action. It could even refer to dreaming as we have seen. If you are learning something new, you are taking action.

Learning a skill is taking action even though there may be no obvious signs of physical action.

One bonus of learning a skill is that you are usually keen to take further action to put your new skill into practice to test your powers.

Some people take the view that learning or taking in information does not require effort or action. It does.

Even dreaming requires effort especially when it seems the dreams are not coming true.

Sitting through long hours in a seminar takes considerable effort. I have great respect for those who are often contemptuously called 'seminar junkies'.

At least they are taking the action of attending a seminar which may well be many miles away. Such attendance is often necessary to learn new skills and to build new confidence.

Most of the abundance teachers tell us to imagine vividly that we have achieved our goals as soon as we wake up and just before we fall asleep. We need to day dream regularly.

This takes an effort. It means we must exercise our will power to focus on our dreams daily. This, too, is a kind of action.

If you want to learn the skill of a copywriter, you need to dream daily about the benefits of being a skilled or even semi-skilled copywriter.

You then need to take the more obvious action necessary to study the work of the great copywriters and to write out their copy so that you can begin to think as they think.

You then need to actually write copy for your own products or the products of others. You need to apply your skill.

The moment you started studying the work of copy writers you became a man or woman of action. However, you could argue that when you started dreaming every day about being a copy writer you were also taking some kind of action.

Analyzing exactly what is and what isn't action as opposed to planning and dreaming may well be another way of avoiding action! I hope I am not doing that in this article!

Perhaps I had better shut up and we can both get on with some useful dreaming or some useful action. I hope I haven't confused you too much to do either!

So long as we both dream regularly and systematically and take clear, obvious action to achieve our dreams, we won't go far wrong.