I noticed something strange:
In the movies, it’s always the bad guy who has a plan. The responsibility of the good guys is to thwart it.
If you’re scratching your head, just think of the Chris Nolan Batman movies: even if The Joker asked, rhetorically, “do I seem like a guy with a plan to you,” the answer is yes, yes you do. Everything The Joker did was a masterpiece of planning. Bane says it outright: “it doesn’t matter who we are. What matters is our plan.” We’ll come back to this.
Sauron? Had a plan. Every Bond villain? Plans within plans. Game of Thrones? A show about conflicting plans. I could go on, but you get the point. The good guys are minding their own business until the bad guys show up with their well laid plans, and everyone’s gotta scramble to overcome it.
What I’ve discovered is that, in real life, the exact opposite is true: bad things happen when there is no plan. Do people plan on being late to work, or failing to complete assignments, or drinking too much, or quitting a relationship when it gets hard, or mishandling money, burning bridges, and never amounting to anything?
No. These are things that happen to people who don’t plan. To people who aren’t prepared.
If we’re using movies as an analogy, it’s more like you get to the middle, look around, and realize it’s been going nowhere, and worse. Nothing great is happening, and you can neither avoid nor properly recover from the bad things. Life is just happening to you.
But, why does that not include the good things? Why does “life happens” never mean a lasting, loving relationship, a fulfilling career, physical strength and mental clarity, and both a public and private life you can be proud of?
This was exactly my experience. Somewhere in the middle of my life, I looked around and saw that “the movie” was not progressing as I had hoped. Things were not falling into place. I was not doing well, and I was not happy. It didn’t feel like I was living a real life at all. A life of challenges, accomplishments, and big smiles with people who I love and admire. It wasn’t there, and it wasn’t heading there.
This isn’t going to be a “tell-all” about my life. Maybe later, when that truly has meaning and inspirational value for others, but not today. Because, today, as the man said, “what matters is our plan.”
In keeping with the little movie analogy, here’s a good old Hollywood cliche for you: I became the hero of my own story when I started making and executing plans.
And, these weren’t just any plans. These plans were totally distinct in their method, their quality, and my level of investment in their creation. These were not the new year’s resolutions doomed to failure. These were not the vows to never drink again made in the depths of a head splitting hangover that are broken the moment you recover and your friends hit you up again.
These plans were different. These plans were made to stick. And they did. And my life has never been the same.
However, just as I’m not necessarily here to discuss the negative elements of my personal past today, I’m also not really here to discuss details about my own private life in the present. Again, that’s not the point.
For now, let me just say that the plans are working. The things that were not working are working. Every area of my life,
Health,
Habits,
Fitness,
Finances,
Job,
Relationships,
Creativity,
Overall happiness,
These things are on track. I could walk you through every one of these areas and feel good about you seeing under the hood, so to speak, at a granular level. That is priceless: to be able to look around and see good things, in a good place, moving in a good direction. More on that later, when it matters more to you.
What I want to talk about, and what I had to lay all that out in order to then talk about, is this business of planning.
In time, I’ll get into all the details, but let me give you a kind of prologue here today.
If you’re into time management you might know the name Brian Tracy. Or possibly Cal Newport. But the time management idea that really changed my life comes from John C. Maxwell.
In his book, Thinking for a Change (good title), he has a chapter on long term thinking. In it, he lays out the “thinking schedule” of a successful CEO. Essentially, you set aside longer and longer blocks of time for thinking and planning for each increment of time:
A few minutes at the end of the day,
A half hour at the end of the week,
A half day at the end of the month,
Longer blocks at the 3, 6, and 9 month markers,
And, ultimately, a month’s worth of planning at the end of the year.
Long story short:
I’ve done this two years consecutively now, and will be doing it again this coming year.
Yes, I spend time every single day, for the entire month of December, planning the entirety of the following year.
This has dramatically changed my life for the better. This is what I want to get across to you. The seemingly radical and extreme act of trying to exert more control over my life than I ever had, more than I ever thought possible, was exactly what I needed.
Thinking about how you want the next year to go is one thing if you do it for a few minutes. Or an hour, or even a day. I’d beg almost nobody even spends a full day. I spent, at a minimum, thirty minutes a day, with a Google doc in front of me,
For thirty days.
As they say, let that sink in.
Let the gravity of that dawn on you.
I worked on a yearly plan every single day for a month. In that time I surveyed my life from top to bottom, gained clarity on where I was truly at, and searched for the roads that would reliably lead me in the right direction.
The difference between thinking out loud and living with a concrete document for an entire month is the refinement of thought. You drop the truly pie in the sky stuff. You permit yourself a small handful of longshots that are worth the risk.
You stratify the different areas in your life and start to see little ways they can be improved, and, even more importantly, you see that the big, serious improvements are actually made up of many small components.
And, because you are spending an entire month on formulating this plan, you don’t turn back in discouragement when you see that it’s actually many small steps and cannot be done quickly.
You simply assign each other those benchmarks to a reasonable increment of time.
Pretty soon, you realize just how much can be accomplished over the span of 365 days without any particular day becoming any more cluttered. Just spent differently.
Not just differently: more easily.
When I gave myself a month to plan a year, I was approaching time luxuriously. Not scarcely. Not frantically. As a result, I’ve been able to accomplish a tremendous amount of the goals I laid out for myself, two years in a row.
We’re out of time for today, but I’ve accomplished my mission:
To introduce you to the idea of long term planning, and to lay the ground work for more informative conversations in the future. I want to get into the weeds with you on this. And, more importantly, I want to teach you to do this.
But this is where it has to start.
Thanks for your time, talk to you soon.
Jas
I noticed something strange:
In the movies, it’s always the bad guy who has a plan. The responsibility of the good guys is to thwart it.
If you’re scratching your head, just think of the Chris Nolan Batman movies: even if The Joker asked, rhetorically, “do I seem like a guy with a plan to you,” the answer is yes, yes you do. Everything The Joker did was a masterpiece of planning. Bane says it outright: “it doesn’t matter who we are. What matters is our plan.” We’ll come back to this.
Sauron? Had a plan. Every Bond villain? Plans within plans. Game of Thrones? A show about conflicting plans. I could go on, but you get the point. The good guys are minding their own business until the bad guys show up with their well laid plans, and everyone’s gotta scramble to overcome it.
What I’ve discovered is that, in real life, the exact opposite is true: bad things happen when there is no plan. Do people plan on being late to work, or failing to complete assignments, or drinking too much, or quitting a relationship when it gets hard, or mishandling money, burning bridges, and never amounting to anything?
No. These are things that happen to people who don’t plan. To people who aren’t prepared.
If we’re using movies as an analogy, it’s more like you get to the middle, look around, and realize it’s been going nowhere, and worse. Nothing great is happening, and you can neither avoid nor properly recover from the bad things. Life is just happening to you.
But, why does that not include the good things? Why does “life happens” never mean a lasting, loving relationship, a fulfilling career, physical strength and mental clarity, and both a public and private life you can be proud of?
This was exactly my experience. Somewhere in the middle of my life, I looked around and saw that “the movie” was not progressing as I had hoped. Things were not falling into place. I was not doing well, and I was not happy. It didn’t feel like I was living a real life at all. A life of challenges, accomplishments, and big smiles with people who I love and admire. It wasn’t there, and it wasn’t heading there.
This isn’t going to be a “tell-all” about my life. Maybe later, when that truly has meaning and inspirational value for others, but not today. Because, today, as the man said, “what matters is our plan.”
In keeping with the little movie analogy, here’s a good old Hollywood cliche for you: I became the hero of my own story when I started making and executing plans.
And, these weren’t just any plans. These plans were totally distinct in their method, their quality, and my level of investment in their creation. These were not the new year’s resolutions doomed to failure. These were not the vows to never drink again made in the depths of a head splitting hangover that are broken the moment you recover and your friends hit you up again.
These plans were different. These plans were made to stick. And they did. And my life has never been the same.
However, just as I’m not necessarily here to discuss the negative elements of my personal past today, I’m also not really here to discuss details about my own private life in the present. Again, that’s not the point.
For now, let me just say that the plans are working. The things that were not working are working. Every area of my life,
Health,
Habits,
Fitness,
Finances,
Job,
Relationships,
Creativity,
Overall happiness,
These things are on track. I could walk you through every one of these areas and feel good about you seeing under the hood, so to speak, at a granular level. That is priceless: to be able to look around and see good things, in a good place, moving in a good direction. More on that later, when it matters more to you.
What I want to talk about, and what I had to lay all that out in order to then talk about, is this business of planning.
In time, I’ll get into all the details, but let me give you a kind of prologue here today.
If you’re into time management you might know the name Brian Tracy. Or possibly Cal Newport. But the time management idea that really changed my life comes from John C. Maxwell.
In his book, Thinking for a Change (good title), he has a chapter on long term thinking. In it, he lays out the “thinking schedule” of a successful CEO. Essentially, you set aside longer and longer blocks of time for thinking and planning for each increment of time:
A few minutes at the end of the day,
A half hour at the end of the week,
A half day at the end of the month,
Longer blocks at the 3, 6, and 9 month markers,
And, ultimately, a month’s worth of planning at the end of the year.
Long story short:
I’ve done this two years consecutively now, and will be doing it again this coming year.
Yes, I spend time every single day, for the entire month of December, planning the entirety of the following year.
This has dramatically changed my life for the better. This is what I want to get across to you. The seemingly radical and extreme act of trying to exert more control over my life than I ever had, more than I ever thought possible, was exactly what I needed.
Thinking about how you want the next year to go is one thing if you do it for a few minutes. Or an hour, or even a day. I’d beg almost nobody even spends a full day. I spent, at a minimum, thirty minutes a day, with a Google doc in front of me,
For thirty days.
As they say, let that sink in.
Let the gravity of that dawn on you.
I worked on a yearly plan every single day for a month. In that time I surveyed my life from top to bottom, gained clarity on where I was truly at, and searched for the roads that would reliably lead me in the right direction.
The difference between thinking out loud and living with a concrete document for an entire month is the refinement of thought. You drop the truly pie in the sky stuff. You permit yourself a small handful of longshots that are worth the risk.
You stratify the different areas in your life and start to see little ways they can be improved, and, even more importantly, you see that the big, serious improvements are actually made up of many small components.
And, because you are spending an entire month on formulating this plan, you don’t turn back in discouragement when you see that it’s actually many small steps and cannot be done quickly.
You simply assign each other those benchmarks to a reasonable increment of time.
Pretty soon, you realize just how much can be accomplished over the span of 365 days without any particular day becoming any more cluttered. Just spent differently.
Not just differently: more easily.
When I gave myself a month to plan a year, I was approaching time luxuriously. Not scarcely. Not frantically. As a result, I’ve been able to accomplish a tremendous amount of the goals I laid out for myself, two years in a row.
We’re out of time for today, but I’ve accomplished my mission:
To introduce you to the idea of long term planning, and to lay the ground work for more informative conversations in the future. I want to get into the weeds with you on this. And, more importantly, I want to teach you to do this.
But this is where it has to start.
Thanks for your time, talk to you soon.
Jas
Make Beautiful Choices 