If you haven’t already then you must start planning for 2018 right now. There’s not a moment to lose.
Why? Because January 1st 2018 is too late.
Planning then is like preparing for a race when the starting gun has already gone off.
And what good is that?
People complain about the period between Christmas and New Year. I’ve complained about it myself, and recently too, but the fact is this time is absolutely idea for planning for the coming year.
Since I got back from Cornwall yesterday I’ve been holed up in a tiny Airbnb studio in Central London, plotting and planning for 2018.
Apart from hitting a 12-step meeting earlier and going for coffee with a friend, followed by a short run, I’ve been hard at it all day. And the work that I’ve done may very well be some of the most important I have undertaken in months.
In fact, the work that I’ve done today will make me a lot of money in 2018.
This isn’t get-rich-quick bull. I very much believe in the old saying ‘fail to plan and plan to fail’, if for no other reason than that there is so much research that suggests that if you write down goals you’re far more likely to exceed them than if you don’t.
I am not some super-organised nerd who likes everything on a spreadsheet. Man, I’m shit at spreadsheets. In my corporate career I attended umpteen Excel training sessions. I’ve forgotten all of them.
If you put me on the scale of EU Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier organised versus Brit-Twit David Davies, I naturally come out somewhere on that scale next to Pete Doherty. I’m all over the place.
But. I didn’t work in that corporate world for nearly two decades without learning anything. And one thing you can’t fault the corporations for not doing is planning. Annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily planning and monitoring goes on everywhere. Actually, they go too far and do too much of it. And too much analysis leads to paralysis.
But if you don’t have a very clear vision of where you are going then how the hell can you expect to get there?
Today I’ve written down very detailed plans for most of next year, including cash flow projections. Of course, these can change. They can be tweaked or they can be altered entirely. But at least they are there, written down, ready for me to start executing.
In my soul I am a creative. All I want to do is be like Francis Bacon and get up in the morning and throw paint at a canvas.
But planning doesn’t reduce creativity. In fact, if anything it frees it up. Brainstorming plans today I’ve come up with some exciting ideas that I would never have thought of otherwise. And now I have a structure within which to execute them. I know what I’m doing in January, February etc., right through until late Summer 2018.
I am relieved of the responsibility of having to think on the fly. Rather than waking up on Jan 1st wondering what I should be doing, I already know. I just have to sit down at the laptop and begin.
I have also spent a lot of time looking at financials. What I want to make and what I need to make. I’ve looked at past results and then, being overly pessimistic on purpose, put together a projection for the year. It looks good. In fact, it looks great.
Again, it may need to be altered radically. But that’s OK. At least I’m going out with a map. At least there’s some sort of structure. And the fact that I created it myself sitting at a desk with a pen and a pad makes it all the more satisfying. And exciting.
Because that’s what’s really great about being an entrepreneur. It is just you against the world (unless you have a business partner. But you know what I mean). It’s up to you to make it happen, and it’s up to you to work out how you’re going to get where you want to go.
There’s no boss anymore. There’s no-one else who’s going to step in and help you out, or take the work off of you. It’s all on you.
Goal-setting is real. In The Power Of Habit, Charles Duhigg describes an experiment conducted by a British psychologist on patients recovering from hip or knee surgery. Rehabilitation after such operations is arduous and many fail to complete it. The psychologist gave out notebooks to five dozen patients asking them to fill in their weekly goals. She then compared the recoveries of those who filled in goals with those who didn’t. The patients who had written down their plans started walking again almost twice as fast as those who didn’t.
It seems amazing that writing things down can be so powerful, but it is. It sits alongside techniques like affirmations and visualisation that feel hokey, but have actual, real-world utility.
So I’m glad that I have spent today planning: I will be continuing tomorrow and I encourage you to do the same. Because 2018 is going to be an enormous year for me, and it can be for you too, with girls and in your businesses life.
But all of us have to put in the work, no exceptions.
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