My Principal in High School used to tell us then that “to fail to plan is to plan to fail”. He was a University graduate of English Language and must have quoted this statement from one of the many books he must have studied. He used to give us advice through such quotes.
We were young then and most of us never really understood those comments. However, as I grew older, I began to see signs of the truth and wisdom of those comments, especially the failing to plan that meant planning to fail.
Most people do not have a road map for their lives and just sort of follow any direction in which life pushes them. This lifestyle looks just like a road junction that opens into many road arteries and yet only one leads to the correct destination. If there is no map to guide one, such person would have to keep trying each road, come back, take the next one and so on and so forth. You can therefore imagine how time consuming and tedious that would be.
On the other hand, with a map that has the destination, you can immediately tell which road to follow. This is why you see many people jumping from one venture to the other all in a bid to make it in life. They start a venture, fail, give up, move to another one, fail, give up, move to yet another and so on and so forth.
If the truth be told, some few are able to keep moving this way until they hit the right venture. However for most, the result is a continuous struggle without any positive result to show.
Research experience has shown that most projects fail at planning stage. They fail because the planners do not properly think through before drawing the plan and at implementation stage, they get bogged down by so many challenges that the project becomes somewhat like a white elephant.
This therefore should guide you reading this piece that proper planning is required if you are to obtain lasting success in your desired endeavour. You just cannot afford to leave things to chance as the average person would do and get average results. You must think through carefully and come up with something that will work.
Take note though, that no plan is foolproof for the simple fact that you cannot get all details once; and that is why a constant periodic review is required to further consolidate on the initial plan. Planning is better than not planning because it gets more than 70% of the work done.
The other part comes from the implementation where attitude, discipline and focus are the main drivers required to get things done. So, what then should be the components of one’s plan? The very basic components should be:
(1) an objective or goal
(2) required resources – tools, people and things required to work the plan
(3) likely challenges to encounter and how to tackle or overcome them (very important)
These should be expatiated to obtain as much information as required and it would vary slightly depending on the objective.
This should then guide the implementation and as I said earlier, a constant periodic review would be required to ensure we are on track. This review would show what is working, what needs modification, what additional resources are required and what is not working. This could be done either monthly, quarterly or bi-annually.
I can assure you this takes a lot of discipline to achieve but it is worthwhile if your objective is true wealth from any endeavour you undertake. On your road to achievement, never forget the maxim, “to fail to plan is to plan to fail”.
© copyright Gabriel Ama.
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