We all know the quote. It’s plastered all over sales bullpens in corporate America.

“You miss 100% of the shots you never take.”

Yes, it’s one of those overused quotes, and yes, it’s become commonplace, but It really is a good quote. Leave it to the Great One to come up with an all-timer in the motivation department.

The quote works in every facet of life: Want to close more sales? Pick up the phone and call someone. Have a crush on a girl? Ask her out on a date. Have a great business idea? Start a business. Want to be a writer? Start writing.

We all know it’s not that simple. Let’s start with the writing thing. I’ve wanted to be a writer my entire life. I’ve always admired the great writers. At an early age it started with Ernest Hemingway and Jack London. But I never actually did it.

I just sat there and dreamed about it and never took action. My mind gave me an endless list of excuses.

“With a career and a wife and three kids I just don’t have the time.”

“There’s so many writers out there, who would want to read me.” (still working on this one)

“I don’t have any formal training. I’m not even sure if my grammar is correct.” (It’s probably not)

The irony is that I’ve used the Gretzky quote over and over in my professional career to motivate others. For nearly twenty-years I’ve had a successful sales career in tech. During that time I’ve both managed and mentored too many sales reps to count. Inevitably when you manage or mentor a young person breaking into professional sales the subject of the most difficult thing to do in sales comes up— pick up the phone and call someone.

That’s where the Gretzky quote typically comes out, so it's ironic that I never took the advice. Isn’t that how life is though? We all have big dreams, but only a small portion of us actually take massive action to achieve those dreams. Many of us adopt the mentality that we lack the skill or we aren’t talented enough, but for most of us the data shows that isn’t true.

A great example is Ray Dalio, one of the most successful investors of all time and author of the fantastic book Principles. In the opening of the book Dalio makes it clear that his immense success isn’t driven by genius level intelligence:

“Before I begin telling you what I think, I want to establish that I’m a ‘dumb shit’ who doesn’t know much relative to what I need to know. Whatever success I’ve had in life had more to do with my knowledge of how to deal with not knowing anything I know. The most important thing I learned is an approach to life based on principles that help me find out what’s true and what to do about it.”

Dalio’s success, which is brilliantly outlines in his book, is based on striving for a lot in life and setting audacious goals to accomplish it.

The operative word here is audacious and how you define failure. Everyone goes through periods where they consider themselves a failure, because there are always things we will fail at, no matter how talented or driven we are. The key is to set big goals and don’t stop when you fail to achieve that goal. According to Dalio we need to “strive for a lot and fail well.”

The term “fail well” is a fascinating way to re-define failure. Most of us think of failure as something that is bad. With this mindset failure is a good thing, provided you are learning and moving past it. Thus, failure can be a lesson allowing you to “fail well.”

Dalio lays out his Five-Step Process to Get What You Want Out of Life in the book.

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It’s a continuous loop of setting a goal, failing at the goal, diagnosing what caused you to fail, designing a plan to overcome that failure and then execute that plan. What I like about the process is that it builds in eventual failure. Too many people let initial failure completely derail their dreams. Dalio’s model rightfully assumes that failure will happen and it’s the lessons you learn from those failures, and the subsequent improvements, that drive real progress.

More from Dalio:

“I learned my principles over a lifetime of making mistakes and spending a lot of time reflecting on them. Since I was a kid, I’ve been a curious, independent thinker who ran after audacious goals. I got excited about visualizing things to go after, had some painful failures going after them, learned principles that would prevent me from making the same sort of mistakes again, and changed and improved, which allowed me to imagine and go after even more audacious goals and do that rapidly and repeatedly over a long time.”

It all comes down to action and disregarding the limitations we’ve set for ourselves in the past and continue to set. Dalio himself admits that his success is not based on genius level intelligence, but a strong work ethic and the guts to go after big goals. The greatest achievers in history all of one thing in common— they all put themselves out there and pushed way beyond their comfort zone.

Passion just isn’t enough, you have to build in intense persistence. Add those two together and you have Grit, a characteristic that Elizabeth Duckworth has identified as the greatest predictor of success. Unfortunately there are many more people that have passion than persistence.

According to Duckworth: “Grit entails working strenuously toward challenges, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity and plateaus in progress. The gritty individual approaches achievement as a marathon; his or her advantage is stamina.”

So the point is, to steal another cliche term from the 80’s, just do it. I may never become a popular writer. In fact, you may be one of a privileged few that actually reads this post. The point is, like Dalio, I’ve set an audacious goal to build an audience and put in the hard work to eventually (hopefully) become a writer that others want to read. I may miss this shot, but I’ll at least have taken it.

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