What is ‘Organized Planning?’ The phrase itself appears to be a tautology – planning is always organized, isn’t it?
Well, not everyone is an organized person. They may make ‘plans’ to go to the beach, to make dinner, or to go on a vacation. In general these are more mundane than John F. Kennedy’s ‘we will go to the moon before this decade is out.’
When it comes to making BIG plans that affect our lives, most people are not organized in the way that would be necessary to get to the moon. But what if they did? Imagine the effect that would make on their lives!
When Kennedy first expressed the desire to get to the moon, all the essentials of success mentioned so far were at work – Desire (and inspiration), Faith, Imagination – these were what Kennedy did in the public space. He created the inspiration that sparked the entire program.
“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
(to watch the full speech, click on the image)
This part of the success equation is the ‘leadership’ part, which is essential of all organized planning. You can have a leader who leads a team or you can be your own leader. A leader inspires his team, amongst other things too numerous to go into here.
How did we actually get to the moon? Was it with an instant ‘bang’ that we got there!?
Of course not.
To actually get to the moon, an entire agency (NASA) was set up to plan and co-ordinate the effort to get to the moon. The agency was essentially a very large ‘Master Mind’ – many many minds coming together on one single task, and it required leadership to operate.
The moon project consisted of several sub-projects – initial rocket testing, the Mercury and Gemini missions, and finally the Apollo missions that culminated in the first landing in 1969.
In other words, it was incremental testing and learning using both Creative and Synthetic Imagination. Along the way, more and more Specialized Knowledge was added to the total of human knowledge in a huge variety of areas from astronautics to human behavior in space. By picking a target bigger than we are, we elevated ourselves as a species.
The example of the moon project is of course a very large example of organized planning and execution. But it still applies on the personal level as well.
For instance, you can set up your own ‘master mind’ team to help you create and execute plans for your success. For instance, there is a web site called ‘Meetup‘ that does just this. It helps people get together in local groups who want to achieve something for themselves. I will elaborate on the Master Mind in a later article.
Once you get an idea and have turned it into plans, obviously the next step is to take the necessary action to move you to success. You may not necessarily know ‘what’ action to take, so sometimes the best way is to just ‘try something.’
That ‘something’ will either succeed or fail, but one way or the other, you will get more information to move you further on to your goal. If you fail, apply that newly acquired knowledge and try again. Trial and error can be an effective strategy, even though it can be expensive and inefficient.
The main idea is not to quit if you apparently fail. Some people say there is no failure, only feedback. If you accept the idea of failure, then you have truly failed and you are beaten. However if you do not accept the idea of failure, you can only succeed. You know the saying…
‘Tis a lesson you should heed:
Try, try, try again.
If at first you don’t succeed,
Try, try, try again.