Creating Your Plan

Whether it's a business plan or a life plan, here's a quick way to get started.

Don’t forget this Sunday is the Second Sunday of the month so it’s Support Group Sunday for all of my paid subscribers.

There are 8 weeks left in the year! Do you have a plan for 2025?

Watch this quick 4-minute video to get started.

Edited transcript:

In this video, I'm going to tell you the biggest mistake people make while planning, give you some tips to put together your plan, and give you a little trick that I use that keeps me from getting stuck in research and planning mode and pushes me to action.

Avoid this big mistake …

Whether or not it's a business plan, financial plan, exercise plan, diet plan, even a novel, the biggest mistake people make is they don't know the ending.

They have what I call a phantom goal. What is a phantom goal? A phantom goal looks like a regular goal, but it has not been thought all the way through.

Let me give you an example. A friend of mine hated his job, so he

quit his job, got a bunch of clients, and then he hated his business.

It turns out, he hated his job because he hated his boss. And the clients he got were just as demanding as his former boss.

Knowing the real reason why he wanted to be his own boss, he could have went to a job with a better boss or made sure to select his clients with more care.

And so I would posit to you that before you put together this plan, here are some things to consider:

• What do I want my life to look like?

• How do I want to feel when I've done the hard work?

Because it can be very easy to get caught up in the techniques and the culture of you're environment and the influences of other people, and start to veer off your real goal.

And what makes it so hard to have a true goal is so many times we don't know what we truly want.

If that is the case for you, your goal needs to be to figure out what you want first.

Then your plan becomes more about, how can I test what I like? How can I figure out what I like? Should I get an internship here? Should I try this sport? That is what your plan should be.

Here comes the fun part …

You have your goal. Now comes the fun part. David Allen once said, "Your mind is made for having ideas, not for storing them."

That is why this next step is so important in figuring out your plan. I want you to grab a notebook or open a document on your computer, or even grab your phone and just start recording. You are now going to do a brain dump.

What is a brain dump?

It is just a freestyle brainstorming of absolutely everything that you want to do for this plan, everything you need to learn, everything you already know, all the resources you have at your disposal, all the people you know that can help you, etc.

Just list it all, no rhyme or reason, and jdrop it into this document.

This is where it's important to know yourself.

If you're the kind of person who overthinks, set a time limit. If you're the kind of person who under thinks, set a time limit. It's just your time limit is going to be longer if you're a person who jumps in before thinking things through, and if you're a person who overthinks things, you're going to set a time limit that's going to create stopgap before you go into analysis paralysis.

Once you finish your brain dump, I want you to think of a milestone.

This is going to be your first post, your first chapter, or an outline.

Maybe you want to run a marathon, so it's going to be a 5K.

Whatever it is, you're going to set a milestone and you're going to set a deadline from there. You're going to go through that brain dump, and you're going to pick out all the things that you absolutely have to do to hit that milestone and things you would like to do to hit that milestone.

And then everything else is in the later pile. And this is where my trick comes in for people who have a tendency to get stuck in planning and research mode ...

Don’t get stuck in research mode

I call this my CIA super spy mission method, which is you. Only start to research things on a need to know basis. You officially have your first mission, and it is to get to milestone one.

Why do this? Because a lot of people make this elaborate plan, and then it turns out once you start the plan and you find you have new information that makes most of the plan obsolete.

To quote Joey from Friends, "It's all a moo point."

That's why before you do the entire plan, it's important to have a mini goal, hit that first milestone, celebrate that milestone, and then take that information to decide what the second milestone and the third and the fourth will be.

You may find after milestone one or two that you might not even want the goal. And uh, so it's even better that you didn't spend all of that time trying to figure out your plan.

This Sunday, October 5, 2024 at 3pm PST

Don’t forget this Sunday is the Second Sunday of the month so it’s Support Group Sunday for all of my paid subscribers. Please register in advance.