Planning

Planning is the pillar and the backbone of every venture that would be successful. A popular quote we are all familiar with is “to fail to plan, is to plan to fail”. Let us delve a little further into this statement and analyze it.

According to the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, a plan is defined as something we intend to do or achieve. Another definition of plan is a set of things to do in order to achieve something, especially one that has been considered in detail in advance. While planning is defined as the act or process of making plans for something. Well these definitions may look like a no-brainer, most of us reading this right now would be like “who doesn’t know these”.  But actually, there are deeper truths in these definitions than we know.

Most of us, have started the new year by making out ‘plans’. We have a list of things we desire to achieve before the year ends. We may have written them down on our note pad, tablets or iPad, and we are confident that these would go so well. Well, the truth is that most of us end at the first definition of planning; we make a list of stuff we want to do before the year ends and that’s where it all ends. So we have a list of things we aim to achieve, call them goals for the new year. They may be SMART goals, with timelines and all but one key ingredient is missing. This missing ingredient is called information. The second definition of planning may look too stressful to attempt; like come on, who wants to know the full details of how everything will play out in the future. Like you gotta be a psychic or something to know the future right? Well my dear reader, that is not correct. Information is the key to predicting the future. 

The planning process for every venture is the most important part of it all and it takes the most time. Event planners would tell you more about this. Let’s use an example we can relate to, let us say you got a party you are hosting, maybe a surprise birthday for someone. A lot goes into it, you arrange the food, make calls to get information about the venue, the type of stuff the person likes is found out and everything is double checked before the special day comes. Based on the information we have acquired about the person we are planning the event for, every thing goes smoothly. Now the aim was known; make an awesome surprise party. Now if the plan was to make an awesome surprise party and the right information was not gotten, there is a high probability that the plan would "go south". Maybe, you would get Sprite when the person likes Fanta or you would make a lot of wrong song choices. Information is key to successful planning. 

This is the same way we should go about planning our lives, we should first get the proper information about what we need to make our goals and dreams for the year a reality. Based on the information we have received; we then should put strategies on ground to make these dreams a reality. Stay tuned for more on planning in my next post. Be blessed, Be inspired.