Success is something that most people strive for but far fewer actually reach their desired levels of it. A lot of this can be boiled down to their plan for success or lack thereof. To efficiently carry something out, a great first step is to outline a plan. This goes for any instances in life. For example, a football team doesn’t just stroll onto a field on gameday without having a plan. This would almost guarantee their loss assuming they play a team equally or more talented than they are. Success starts with a plan, and how you go about life should not be any different. In order to develop a plan, you must first define your goals and then later how you plan on reaching them.
Defining your goals
No matter your goals and aspirations, a success plan is necessary to reach that ultimate goal. For the purposes of this blog, let’s say that financial freedom is your ultimate goal. Great! Now, in order to make your goal stick, consider adding some sort of purpose to that goal. For example, you may say “I want to reach financial freedom so I can quit my job that I hate.” Adding some purpose to your goal will keep you motivated on your quest to achieving it. Without this sort of motivation, sticking to a goal may be difficult. If you can’t find a single important motivator to inspire you to reach your goal, you may want to reconsider if the goal you have set is one you really want to achieve in the first place. Once you have your goal(s), it is time to start developing your plan to reach them.
Developing your plan of action
Your plan should not be overcomplicated and should simply provide the best way you see as of this very moment to reach your goals. Some aspects will change and some will become more apparent along your journey, but it is important to have a basic trajectory of how you will reach your goals so that you don’t meander around and waste time doing nothing. Going back to the financial freedom goal, a plan of action could be to learn and understand real estate investing. This is a broad plan and it can and will be narrowed down for specificity. What specifically do you want to learn about and focus on in real estate investing? Do you want to flip houses, become an agent, pursue buy and holds, or anything else I haven’t mentioned? Pick what most excites you and focus all the time and energy you want to exert into this plan of action on this one task. This will ensure you become the best you can be at one specific task rather than trying and failing at being a jack-of-all-trades. Remember to start narrow and focused and only broaden your scope as you begin to reach mastery at your specific plan.
Having more than one plan of action for complex goals
Financial freedom is a complex goal that one may take many avenues to reach. This is why it may be wise to have multiple plans of action to achieve your more complex goals such as this one. We have already mentioned real estate investing, but say you are interested in stock investing as well. Now, you’ll have to divide your allotted time to accomplish your plan of action into two in order to account for time needed in pursuing each plan. My suggestion and a method I use myself specifically with financial freedom is to choose a main plan and make whatever other plans I have as passive and simple as possible. My main plan involves learning and acquiring buy and hold real estate, so for my plan on stocks I do not trade actively and am a pure buy and hold investor. I generally don’t look at the market every day because of my chosen strategy, and it takes up very little of my own time aside from reading books and keeping up to date with general market trends to accomplish my stock market plan. I focus specifically on investing in ETFs which are by design a passive investment that incapsulates large sanctions of the general market depending on what ETFs you choose to invest in. Because of the passive nature of these “side plans” so to speak, you have the ability to take on a few of them. However, be wary to not spread yourself too thin as sometimes things come up that need your attention that you may have not accounted for earlier and could have the ability to make your life harder than it needs to be.
Don’t spread yourself too thin
Understanding how much effort needs to be put into plans in order to achieve them is key to understand before formulating other plans to reach your goals. If you know something is going to take up a lot of time, give it the time it needs to nurture and grow instead of taking time away to deviate focus to another plan. Understand your capabilities as a human being and know the more you take on at once, the higher likelihood you will fail. Narrow your focus and don’t take on more than you can handle. Most importantly, make sure your plan(s) fits your needs and abilities. Give the most time to the things that excite you the most and that you want to be best at. To reach your goals, you don’t usually have to be a master at everything, so don’t treat your plans like that. Change and adapt your plan as you learn and grow and your ultimate goal will undoubtedly be reached!