If you’ve never started anything on your own but really have the itch, your success might come in the form of a “perfect bad plan”. Here’s what we mean by that:
You see, everything good starts with a bad plan, in most cases.
If you were to go back in time and do something all over again, you’d probably be at least twice as fast.
You’d land that job way faster, you’d get that skill way faster, and so on.
So by that logic, your original plan was not that great, but it led to something good. Great job.
And speaking of time travel, people fear changing any detail in history so they don’t cause a massive butterfly effect.
But at the same time, they don’t think about changing one little thing now that will have a massive effect in the future.
You see, it’s not about having an amazing plan to begin with.
It’s about having the perfect “bad” plan. And this is how you do it, step by step.
Don’t worry if you don’t feel like reading; you can enjoy the video below or watch it on YouTube:
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Stage one: Setting up the “bad” plan
The first thing you need to understand about how this works is that first drafts are pretty much always flawed. And it’s supposed to be that way.
Your job, now at the beginning, is not to come up with the perfect plan, but with any plan.
Think about all those people who never worked out a minute in their lives, but they stress about the best workouts with the maximum gains and the best diet for ultra-fast weight loss.
That’s you now, cooking up a grand master plan that even you don’t know exactly how it works.
The things you hope will happen a year from now will probably happen in a different form and at a different time.
The point is, you should not really stress about that, because at the very first stage, your only job is to have one generic, broad, and simple basic plan.
So let’s say you want to… I don’t know… start a YouTube channel and sustain yourself from ad revenue. Solid idea.
Your basic plan should be to make x number of videos in the next x months, no matter what.
That’s it; that’s your plan.
It doesn’t matter how good your content is or how many numbers you generate.
That’s stuff for another time.
Now, the second part of the stage one process is risk assessment.
You see, for a bad plan to be good, it must not leave you bankrupt, dead, or in jail.
That’s pretty much it.
So you need to set up some limits for yourself that should never be crossed.
And the way to do this is to really think about the worst-case scenarios.
For example, investing too much time into this might make you underperform at the current thing you’re doing, which may lead to getting fired and now you are homeless.
That’s a bad “bad” plan.
If you want to open up a coffee shop, and you take out a loan, and the coffee shop sucks, and you can’t pay back your loan, and the bank takes your house, that’s again, a bad “bad” plan.
So it’s really good to go deep into the worst-case scenarios and set up limits so that doesn’t happen.
The final part of stage one is to adopt a flexible mindset.
You will probably not hit every mark, and you will probably miss some arbitrary deadlines.
The point is to keep at it, not to quit when you barely even started.
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Stage two: Executing the bad plan
So you have your generic plan, some limits that keep you grounded, and an open, growth mentality.
The next stage of the process is to implement something we call: The minimum required action
What is the absolute minimum amount of work you have to do to sort of “get away with it”?
It’s usually something you can do right now without needing anything.
For example, let’s say your plan is to get in shape eventually.
The minimum required action is going for a 30-minute walk.
That’s it. You do it once, and you are done with it.
Now, if you can’t pull yourself together and do this little thing, you need to go in the bathroom, throw some cold water on your face, and try again, because this is basic stuff.
The minimum required action has three purposes:
- It gets you to a place where you actually feel like you’re doing it.
- It’s the first step in creating a habit on which you will end up relying.
- It’s also the first step in creating a feedback loop, which will be discussed later.
So think about the minimum required action, write it down on a piece of paper if you must, then pick a date and a place where you will do it.
It has to be in the next 24 hours to avoid procrastination since this is a low-stakes activity.
You don’t care about anything besides getting it done, regardless of how long it takes or how well you did.
Congratulations! You made your first step, which is by far the hardest.
It’s a walk in the park from now on.
The next step of stage two is to keep doing the minimum required activity for a minimum of around 3 months, or 20 times.
Why this time frame?
Because it’s long enough that you will eventually get to a point where you don’t feel like doing it, but you have to.
That’s the first real-world challenge you have to overcome.
It’s also long enough that it starts to feel like a habit, and you start creating a feedback loop.
If you do something for 3 months, you start to see some patterns and understand some things better.
Even for something as simple as going for a walk, you might notice that the different times of day make the walk more pleasant or that your shoes are not really made for walking so much, so you need better ones.
This is called a feedback loop.
The more you repeat a process, the more you learn about it naturally.
And these learnings will transform the bad plan into a great plan, which is the final stage and the longest and hardest one.
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Stage 3: Evolving from bad to better
If you made it this far, pat yourself on the back; you actually tried to do something, which 99% of people don’t bother with.
You’ve already created a process for this.
You can tell yourself that you’ve been doing this for 3 months and now it’s time to take it to the next level. And the way to do this is actually not that complicated at all.
We split this into three super easy-to-follow steps, so it’s impossible to get this wrong.
STEP 1 – Introduce numbers
Even something as simple as a walk in the park can be analyzed through numbers.
You have the number of steps you’ve taken and the number of minutes it took you.
For anything that you kept doing on a general level for 3 months, you can attach numbers to it.
And these numbers are super important because they will make the difference between a bad plan and a great plan.
So while you keep doing the minimum required activity, keep track of all the numbers you can.
Step 2 – Incremental progress
Essentially, this means what low-cost and low-risk things you can do to improve those numbers even a bit.
For example, for a 30-minute walk, if you run for the first minute every time, that’s incremental progress.
You see, this is actually how companies grow constantly.
It’s not always about multi-million-dollar investments or innovations.
It’s about doing something a little bit better, across the board.
Because these things add up.
So this is your first real piece of work: keeping track of numbers and making incremental progress across the board.
As a rule of thumb, you should look to make progress either week by week or month by month, depending on what you are doing.
This will be the bulk of the work for you; it will take some time.
So the question is, for how long do you keep doing this?
This leads us to the final step.
Step 3 – Making the switch
You will know exactly when you are at the final step of stage 3 when you hit diminishing returns on your incremental progress.
Let’s say you are now straight up running for 30 minutes straight.
You’re not walking anymore. Your stamina is up, you have a great time, and you win awards on that app you track your progress on.
But you can’t just keep running faster and faster forever. It’s done.
There is little to no incremental progress left to be made.
Or let’s say you have your coffee shop running and you sell the most coffee possible in a day at the highest price possible, and there is nowhere to go from here.
This is when you know you are at the final step and it’s time to make the switch towards a new area that allows for incremental progress once again.
Usually, this point comes with a considerable investment in both time and money.
But you are a totally different person now.
You know what you are doing. You have expertise and a track record.
Your original “bad” plan is now bulletproof.
And where you decide to go from here is up to you, because you are now the expert in this.
And that, my fellow readers, is how you make a bad plan work. See you next time!
