Big Plans and Tiny Plans
You must have a plan. From the time we were children they teach us to have plans for what we are going to be when we grow up. Plan for it, and it will happen, just exactly how you imagined it. The thing about plans is that they are too big and unwieldy to really be of any use. But people want plans to be big, they even need them to be big. Otherwise they aren’t significant. They aren’t worth having meetings about and they don’t impress anybody. A plan must be big in order to be convincing.
What if your plan was tiny. What if it was really only a step. An obtainable short term goal. Given the current circumstances, the best possible course of action, and by course of action, I really just mean single action. Make a plan that is really just the next step that is going to take you in the direction you want to go. It doesn’t need to impress anybody. It needs to be focused.
A plan like this is flexible. It isn’t rooted in guesstimations of what the future holds. Tiny plans don’t become irrelevant the second you walk out of the meeting, because that is exactly when they happen. The problem with planning like this, is it requires trusting instincts, there is no grand plan to fall back on and point fingers at when things don’t work. Now you just get to make and act on another plan, the best one for the moment, not the outdated one that didn’t predict where you are right now.
