Achieving success in today’s world has become less chance and more hard work. You hear more stories every day about people who were born with nothing but managed to achieve success in their lives. Achieving success is directly related to the amount of, and quality of planning we put towards our goals.
A plan, allows us to format our dreams into tangible realities that we can easily break down into smaller more manageable chunks.
How many times in your life have you chased success? How many of those times did you end up either back where you started or worse off? And, how many of those times did you plan what you were going to do? Although, it may not seem it at the beginning planning is vital to achieving success, hence why we need to have a complete and comprehensive plan in place from the beginning.
If we want to succeed in life, then we need to ensure that we have the right plan in place. If we don’t then you could be in an awful situation which is worse than having no plan at all.
Imagine you’ve spent months working towards your final goal, only to find out that you made a fatal error in your planning, so you have to begin from the beginning; all your work is now useless. This scenario is what I’m talking about. We need to ensure we not only have a plan but the right one for our goals, it needs to be relevant.
Now we know how it can go wrong, let’s talk about how we can achieve success by implementing the correct plan from the beginning.
Decide
The first step in my plan is to decide what we are going to go after, what is our end goal? What is it we crave beyond everything else? The first step is all about, getting the end picture as clear as we can before moving onto the next step.
Plan
Once we have our final goal described and laid out in front of us, we need to think of the steps we will need to carry out to get from the present to the final goal.
Make the steps as detailed as possible, don’t be vague and don’t hold back on information. Outline every single step you’re going to take to ensure you achieve exactly what you want. Make sure to tie the goals to a timeframe; this will create a timeline for you to follow when achieving your goal.
Execute
Finally, once we know what it is we want, how we are going to get it, and what we need to do. Then we can move onto the final step in the plan which is to execute the steps. One of the most significant downfalls people suffer from is the inability to make a plan and execute it.
The execution of a plan is the most critical part, it is crucial to the achieving or failing of your goals and consequently the success you achieve. If we want to achieve success, then we need to learn how to execute our plans.
Forget about everything apart from this plan and the end goal you desire. You need to become a racing horse with blinkers on. You will not look at the competition; you will not stop until you cross that finish line. As every distraction will take you off your plan, pushing success that bit further away.
Patience is a virtue—but procrastinating is a vice.
If you want to succeed, you can’t sit around and wait for the stars to align. It won’t happen. Think of it this way: unless you’re waiting for something that is absolutely necessary to execute your idea, just execute it.
The lean startup model, popularized by Eric Ries, is all about moving (and changing) rapidly.
The lean startup model encourages execution by focusing on the creation of a minimum viable product (MVP). According to Ries, an MVP is “that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.” Basically, it’s a product that barely meets your target audience’s needs.
We’ve been programmed to want perfection off the bat, but that’s nearly impossible. A lean startup model is about pushing out products and then improving as you go. That’s why creating an MVP can be extremely valuable.
And finally.....
No idea—or product—is ever completely finished. There is always room for improvement, and that’s something you need to accept if you want to get off the ground and start executing.
It’s easy to hold off executing by telling yourself that you’re too busy perfecting. But that’s an excuse. Realize that your idea will need improvement along the way and change it accordingly.