Most people spend a long time planning how to get money, success and their perfect partner, but never end up reaching their goals. Why is that?
Photo from Vincent Boiteau
Finding your dream partner
Think about this scenario:
You briefly meet a person who you find incredibly attractive. You know that you are going to have a chance to see them again at the end of the week. What do you spend the week doing?
You probably spend it planning exactly what you will say to them, what they will say back, how witty, intelligent and interesting you will be all evening until they want to rip your clothes off and spend the rest of their life with you!
What will really happen when you get to see them again?
Well, you’ll probably mumble, bumble and stumble your way through the meeting, end up saying nothing that you planned to and if you’re lucky they may agree to see you again but they certainly won’t be planning the wedding.
So what went wrong?
You planned in too much detail. All you needed was a three step plan
1 – Notice that you like them
2 – Figure out when you will see them again
3 – Make it up as you go along when you do meet them
This has as much chance of working and gives you the rest of the week to get on with something else.
Success and money
It’s the same with having a successful career.
Some people plan what they want to happen to them over the next ten years, planning what jobs they will have and when they will get promoted from one to the next. This is unrealistic as you can’t possibly know what will happen to you. Keep it simple, just do the best job you can in the job you’re currently in, develop the skills you don’t have, enhance the ones you do have and build a network of people who can help you.
Planning in any more detail is a waste of time.
It’s the same with money. Is it worth planning in detail what will happen to your finances if interest rates go up by 1%, 2% or 3% and if your investments fall by 10%, 20% and 30% combined with an increase in inflation by 1%, 2% or 3%?
No it isn’t, you’ve already created 27 different scenarios there and it would be easy to create 100s more. Again keep it simple. All you need to know is that if your finances are quite tight at the moment and the future looks uncertain then you need to find a way to increase your income and/or decrease your costs. Meticulous planning won’t help, it will just waste time that you could have spent on a solution instead of over-analysing the problem.
How to plan effectively
1 – Plan at the right level of detail
This doesn’t necessarily mean only having a very broad plan. The key is to plan down to the level that you can control. On a work project you can probably control a lot of the factors so a detailed plan is worthwhile, if your planning how to woo the beautiful girl/boy next door then you can’t control what they’re going to do so you might as well just get on and give it your best shot.
2 – Take some action
Once you have your plan, at whatever level of detail you can control, then get on and take some action. Delaying will just waste time and make you ineffective.
