It is the action that counts

There is a phrase that many will have heard in their lives at one point or another: it's the thought that counts.

Often stated when actions have proven to be ill-advised or ignorant, the phrase is an attempt to try and recover face for the person who made a mistake because they projected their own desires and motivations onto someone else, and acted in a foolish manner because of it. Yet despite people understanding what is trying to be said, we know it to be fake and meaningless at a practical level.

It doesn't matter if one thought they were driving the speed limit, if they weren't, they weren't.

It doesn't matter if one thought their gift was well thought out, if it wasn't, it wasn't.

Thoughts aren't what matters, actions are. What we do outside of our own head is what people can actually interact with, observe, or react to. Our intentions do not change the nature of what we have done, and that is captured in a related: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I recently learned that an alternative phrasing is: Hell is full of good meanings, Heaven is full of good works. Looking back a couple of days at Genesis 3, the fall of Eve, she thought she was doing a good thing when eating of the fruit, her intentions were not to do evil, but that didn't change whether that was really the case or not.

A Venn diagram "shows all possible logical relations between a finite collection of different sets".

Consider the following:

What matters is not thoughts without actions. Even actions without thoughts can by chance be worthwhile, but are still largely irrelevant. It's where the two overlap that really matters, and where the "work" needs to be done with an individual who is trying to be more than they just think they are. Thoughts must bring action, and action should be the result of thoughts, and if one is struggling in either arena, or in connecting the two, that's one of three places to look and start making changes, regardless of personality type, personal history, or zodiac sign.

Of course, such a technical reduction is more like an automotive repair manual, and looking at the sales of self-help books versus repair manuals, it's easy to see why one would seek to complicate things quite a lot more if seeking to make a business of helping people help themselves.