Planning is one of the worst things you can do. There I said it, I know it goes against everything you hear, but it's the truth.
I saw a post yesterday about a guy talking about figuring out his plan and coming up with precisely what he needed to do to live the life he wanted.
But here's the problem, over the last six months, that's all he's done. He's put up numerous posts about what he needs to be doing or should be doing.
But he's never gotten to the doing part.
Many people get caught up in planning, figuring, or laying out the exact thing they're going to do but never get around to doing it.
The reason is pretty simple. Planning is a great way to feel like you're doing something without actually doing anything.
It gives you that dopamine hit like you're getting started on your goals. It feels great. You can look at your beautiful plan and feel like you've accomplished something…
But the truth is you haven't.
I promise your plan will fall apart almost immediately. It always does with a new business venture. It's not your fault, though. We don't know enough, in the beginning, to put a proper plan together.
Plan later and focus on doing something.
A plan will emerge once you start moving.
But without the doing part, a plan is entirely useless.
When I first started my ketamine clinic, I didn't have much of a plan. I knew that I couldn't work my hospital job much longer, so I started looking for an alternative.
The research sparked my interest in wanting to open a clinic. Wanting to open a clinic turned into discovering ketamine infusion therapy was the best treatment to offer.
So I started buying equipment and deciding where I'd open an office.
I created mini-plans as I went, but it was only enough to get me to the next step.
The same thing happened when I started the Ketamine Academy and teaching others how to open their clinic.
People started calling me asking for help, and when it got to be too much, only then did I start planning a course and offering it to people who called.
Once people started saying yes, I scheduled a start date and planned all my lessons. Once that was a success, I started planning how to share it with more people and grow that business.
My plans all came from doing first and then figuring out what needed to be done next to get to that next small goal.
As I've become a more seasoned business owner, I'm looking a little further into the future to plan, but I still focus heavily on doing first.
The idea is to spend as little time testing if an idea works before putting more effort into it. I don't want to spend a lot of time and energy laying out an elaborate plan to find out a few weeks into that plan it won't work.
I'd rather spend a little bit of time in the beginning, validate the idea, then form a plan around that.
If you've been stuck in the planning phase or believe that you should have a plan all figured out before you start, let me assure you that you don't.
Focus only on the first thing you need to do to reach your goal and start with that.
The sooner you start, the better. Doing builds momentum. Use that momentum to roll into the next part of your plan and keep going.
Stop planning and start doing.
– Jason Duprat, MBA, MSA, CRNA