Planning for success: a simple explanation in 15 steps

When we talk about planning for success, we tend to use words like plan, persistence, resilience, luck, bad luck and so on. Developing these concepts can get somewhat complicated, but we are going to try to simplify them.

Ambitious long-term goals and small short-term objectives. Roughly, it would look like this:

1. Goal: I want to earn €200,000 over the next 5 years.
2. Plan 1: I am going to draw up a plan to achieve it using one of my skills. For example, writing. I am going to write a book.
3. Objective: I am going to write a book that will be finished within 6 months and will bring me €X in income.
4. Strategy: The book will be about ***** (business, investing, financial education…). I will write it and talk to several publishers to see which one will publish it. The book will be 200 pages long.
5. Start date: NOW, immediately. Zero delay.
6. Routine: Every day I will write 4 pages.
7. Discipline: Come rain or snow, I will write those 4 pages every day.
8. Resistance: The publishers are putting obstacles in my way. This is crap, nobody wants to publish my book.
9. Optimism: When problems come up, I won’t complain; I will look for a solution.
10. Plan B: Since nobody wants to publish my book, I am going to self-publish it.
11. Luck: My book has been a huge success and has become a bestseller (congratulations).
12. Bad luck: My book has been a flop.
13. Resilience: What went wrong with my book or my strategy, so I can correct it and make sure it doesn’t happen again?
14. Persistence: I am going to write another book.
15. Never give up: I am going to write a third and a fourth, until one of my books becomes a bestseller.

Too simplistic? Maybe so, but practically 100% of great entrepreneurs and companies share these 15 steps, because they sum up perfectly the idea of setting objectives to reach a goal, facing adversity without losing enthusiasm and energy, learning from previous mistakes and making sure we don’t repeat them in the next project. That is the only way to succeed.

Further reading

• The 32 rules for being a successful entrepreneur

Featured image: Anton Vakulenko, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr.