Wanting vs Doing: How to Close the Ambition-Action Gap in India 2026
Most people say "I want to" and "I will" — but only a few are truly willing to embrace the process and commit to consistent action. Here's how to cross the gap between ambition and results, from Avinash Chate's live sessions.
In one of my live training sessions, I asked 300 professionals: "How many of you want to start a business?" Over 200 hands went up. "How many of you are actively working on it?" Eleven hands went up. The gap between those two numbers — between wanting and doing — is where most ambitions go to die. LinkedIn India's 2026 report shows leadership and action orientation as the #1 skill gap in Indian professionals. After two decades of working with entrepreneurs, executives, and fresh graduates at Tata Tech, L&T, and Mahindra, I can tell you: the secret behind every success story isn't talent. It's the willingness to embrace the process and commit to consistent action — even before you feel completely ready.
TL;DR- The gap between "I want to" and "I am doing" is where most ambitions die — closing it requires willingness to act, not just willingness to dream
- Embracing the process means committing to the daily, often unglamorous work of improvement — not just the vision of the outcome
- The most common reason high-potential Indian professionals underachieve isn't lack of talent — it's waiting for perfect conditions before starting
- Action taken before you feel ready produces more results than perfect preparation with no execution — every time
- Three specific habits that consistently close the wanting-doing gap in Avinash Chate's live training participants
The 200 vs 11 Problem: Why So Many Ambitions Die in the Gap Between Wanting and Doing
In every live training session I run — whether it's 30 executives at a Pune manufacturing company, 200 IT professionals at a Bengaluru technology park, or 500 students at an MBA college in Nagpur — I do the same exercise. "Raise your hand if you have a goal you haven't started working on yet." Every hand in the room goes up, without exception. Then I ask: "Raise your hand if you've been thinking about this goal for more than six months without taking meaningful action." Most hands stay up. This is the wanting-doing gap in live, visible form. It's not unique to India — it's a universal human condition. But in India's specific context — where comparison culture, fear of failure, family expectations, and "wait for the right moment" thinking are all active — the gap is particularly wide, and the cost is particularly high.
What "Wanting" Really Feels Like Versus What "Doing" Actually Requires
Here's the honest distinction between wanting and doing that most motivational content doesn't make. Wanting feels good. It generates a dopamine response — the anticipation of a positive future. Wanting lets you fantasize about the outcome without experiencing the effort, uncertainty, and discomfort of the process. Wanting is easy, risk-free, and pleasant. Doing is different. Doing means showing up on the days when you don't feel motivated. Doing means tolerating the discomfort of being a beginner at something new. Doing means experiencing the gap between your current level and your aspired level every single day, and continuing anyway. Doing means taking action before you have all the information, all the skills, or all the confidence you'd ideally want. Most people choose wanting over doing — not because they're lazy, but because doing is genuinely harder.
The Willingness to Act: The One Attribute That Separates Achievers from Dreamers
The willingness to act is the one attribute that most consistently separates people who achieve their ambitions from those who only talk about them. Not talent. Not intelligence. Not connections. Not resources. The willingness to act — to begin before conditions are perfect, to continue despite uncertainty, to persist past the initial discomfort of the new. I've watched this attribute override every other advantage and disadvantage. First-generation professionals from tier-3 towns who became senior executives at multinational companies — because they were willing to act before they felt qualified. Serial entrepreneurs who failed multiple times and kept going — because they were willing to act again. Junior engineers who proposed solutions in meetings they technically "shouldn't" be speaking in — because they were willing to act despite the hierarchy. The willingness to act is the great equalizer.
Why Waiting for Perfect Conditions is the Most Expensive Career Mistake in India
Here's the specific cost of waiting for perfect conditions, stated plainly: the conditions will never be perfect. The market will never be "ready enough." The skill set will never be "complete enough." The timing will never be "right enough." The competitor will always be ahead of you in some dimension. The family situation will always have some complication. Waiting for perfect conditions is a permanent waiting room. I've met professionals in India who've been preparing to launch a startup for seven years — studying, planning, attending workshops, building decks — but have never built the first product or talked to the first customer. The preparation is real. But preparation without action is just organized procrastination. The good news is that imperfect action — messy, uncertain, incomplete action — produces more progress in one month than perfect preparation produces in one year.
| Behavior | Wanting Mode | Doing Mode |
|---|---|---|
| Relationship with the goal | Fantasize about the outcome | Commit to the daily process |
| Action trigger | "When conditions are right, I'll start" | "I'll start now with what I have" |
| Response to discomfort | Retreat back to planning mode | Accept discomfort as evidence of growth |
| Relationship with imperfection | Wait until it's good enough | Ship imperfect, learn, iterate |
| Source of motivation | Excitement about the vision | Daily measurable progress |
| Response to early failure | Evidence that "it wasn't meant to be" | Data for the next iteration |
| 5-year outcome | Same goal, still in preparation | Compound growth, visible progress |
Embracing the Process: The Unglamorous Secret Behind Every Success Story
Embracing the process means making peace with the fact that the work itself — the daily, often unglamorous, repetitive work of improvement — is the actual thing. The outcome is just the bookmark. In my live sessions, I often tell the story of Rashid Khan — who didn't arrive at world-class bowling through inspiration. He arrived through ten thousand unglamorous repetitions, most of which nobody watched. Indian professionals obsess over the destination: the corner office, the ₹1 crore CTC, the TEDx stage, the startup exit. The people who reach those destinations obsess over the system — the daily process that makes the destination inevitable. When you embrace the process, you stop needing the outcome to feel motivated in the present. The process becomes its own reward — because every day of the process is a day of measurable improvement, and measurable improvement is deeply satisfying in a way that fantasizing about the outcome never is.
Three Practical Habits That Close the Ambition-Action Gap in 30 Days
Three practical habits that I've seen consistently close the wanting-doing gap in the professionals I train. Habit 1: The Five-Minute Start. The biggest barrier to action is starting — not continuing. Commit to just five minutes of work on your most important goal before you do anything else in the morning. Not thirty minutes. Not an hour. Five minutes. The evidence across behavioral psychology is consistent: once you've started, continuing is dramatically easier. Habit 2: Shrink the Next Step. The reason ambitious goals don't get started is that the next action seems too large. "Write a book" is paralyzing. "Write one paragraph this morning" is doable. Break every meaningful goal down until the next step is small enough to take immediately. Habit 3: Declare It. Tell one specific person your next action and the specific timeline you've committed to. Public commitment activates accountability in a way that private intention never does. These three habits, applied consistently, break the wanting-doing cycle at its root.
What Avinash Chate Tells Entrepreneurs, Graduates, and Executives About Taking Action
Here's what I consistently tell the three audiences I work with most: entrepreneurs, students, and corporate professionals. To entrepreneurs: the idea will never be perfect enough to launch. The market will give you better feedback in 30 days of operation than you can generate in six months of planning. Launch the imperfect version. To students: the career capital you build in your 20s is disproportionately valuable — the cost of starting a skill, a project, or a business is lowest now, and the compounding benefit is highest. Don't wait for graduation, for the "right" job, for the MBA. Start the thing. To corporate professionals: the stretch assignment feels risky, and it is. But the cost of not taking it — the cost of being comfortable in the same role five years from now — is higher than the risk of taking it and struggling. The good news I can share from 20 years of watching people's careers unfold: the regrets almost always come from what people didn't do, not what they tried and failed. Wanting is comfortable. Doing is the thing that actually changes your life.
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Avinash Chate TEDx Speaker · Founder, The Future Corporate · 11+ yrs experience Avinash has trained Indian Army, BRO, RBI, BARC, JSW Steel and 1000+ corporate leaders across India. His work focuses on leadership development, communication skills, and behavioural training rooted in Indian values and modern business needs. |
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do so many ambitious Indian professionals fail to take action on their most important goals?
The most common reasons ambitious Indian professionals don't act on their goals are: (1) Waiting for perfect conditions — the market to be ready, the skill to be complete, the timing to be right. (2) Fear of failure — specifically the fear of what a failed attempt will say about them to others or to themselves. (3) The comparison trap — seeing peers who appear further ahead and concluding that it's already too late. (4) Perfectionism — an unwillingness to do something until they're confident they can do it well. All four of these feel like wisdom but are actually forms of sophisticated procrastination. The consistent pattern among people who achieve their ambitions is that they acted before these conditions were resolved — and found that the act of starting changed all four dynamics in their favor.
What is the single most important habit to close the gap between ambition and action?
The single most important habit is what I call the Five-Minute Start: committing to spend just five minutes on your most important goal before doing anything else in your day. The behavioral science behind this is well-established: the biggest barrier to action is initiation, not continuation. Once you've started something, the psychological momentum to continue is dramatically stronger than the resistance to begin. Five minutes of work on your goal before email, before news, before social media builds a daily habit that compounds powerfully. The second reason this habit works: it removes the "I don't have time" barrier. You have five minutes. Everyone has five minutes. Starting before you feel motivated, before conditions are perfect, before you feel ready — this is the habit that separates people who eventually achieve from people who eventually explain why they didn't.
How do you stay motivated and keep taking action when the process is slow and results aren't visible?
Motivation is the wrong thing to rely on for consistent action — because motivation fluctuates with mood, sleep, energy, and external events. The professionals I know who consistently take action on their most important goals don't rely on motivation. They rely on systems: scheduled time blocks, accountability partners, public commitments, and environment design that makes the desired action easier than the alternative. When you don't feel like taking the action, your system executes anyway. The second tool for maintaining progress through slow periods is measuring lead metrics rather than lag metrics. A lag metric is the final outcome — revenue, promotion, publication. A lead metric is the daily action that produces the outcome — conversations held, pages written, applications submitted. Tracking lead metrics daily gives you visible progress even when the lag metrics are still catching up.
What is the difference between people who achieve their ambitions and those who only dream about them?
The difference, stated plainly, is willingness — specifically the willingness to embrace the process and keep acting during the period when results aren't yet visible. The people who achieve their ambitions are not more talented, more connected, or more resourced than the people who don't. They are more willing to be uncomfortable for longer in pursuit of the outcome they want. They begin before they're ready. They continue when it's hard. They adjust when the first plan doesn't work. They reach the destination through accumulation of imperfect actions, not through a perfect plan executed flawlessly. The great insight I've gained from 20 years of watching people succeed and not succeed is this: the people on the other side of their ambition didn't find the journey easier than you think it would be. They found it exactly as hard — and did it anyway.
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By Avinash Chate — Maharashtra’s #1 Corporate Trainer & Motivational Speaker. .