Planning vs Doing

For how long should you plan before doing something?

Or should you even plan things out in the first place?

Let’s say you want to write a book. You need to have a vision in your mind about the book, what is it about and how might the characters interact. It might even be important for you to know why you are writing this book. Perhaps you need to read similar books to get a feel of how other authors go about things. You’ll perhaps start listening to podcasts where famous authors talk about their methods and even sign up for courses and watch videos that teach you even more methods. But when will you feel confident enough to start writing?

There’s this thing called “Tutorial Hell” which a lot of people go through when they are learning something, it’s when people just keep consuming more and more content and never really do something on their own. I’d say that’s a bit too much prep work. Sure, tutorials are helpful but you should still find the time to do something on your own because that’s where you grow. Watching other people do things and talk about their “methods” is fine and even some of those methods might be helpful to you but you won’t know that without going through the motions yourself.

How do we get better at something? BY FAILING! We need to fail so we know where our boundaries lie and by doing so we keep moving our boundaries further and further (with no known ceiling).

A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new

Creating a habit shouldn’t require much planning but improvement however, that’s another story.

You see if you get into the habit of going to the gym, that’s great but let’s say your goal is to get stronger but you have no plan on how to do that. Then you’ll reach a plateau after a while because you haven’t got a long term plan. You need to progressively overload your exercises, sleep well and eat accordingly to achieve your goals in the gym.

So it’s always a mix of planning and doing. It’s not really obvious which you should do first, if you do start with the planning then please be cautious of not overdoing it. I see people that are planning a speech and notice how they plan each word, and put way too much effort into the planning that once they get to the speech it feels forced and awkward. For some people the overplanning might be what it takes to give a great speech, but I for whatever reason am fond of the spontaneity and honesty that people bring to the table when they are themselves and speak their own true words.

• Instead of thinking how things might go, just see how they go
• Instead of trying to guess what someone thinks, just ask.

Start off by just making it a habit and as time passes you need to plan the next steps towards improvement.

It really is an iterative process of planning and doing.

The doing tells you about the planning and vice versa. You’ll quickly know if a plan doesn’t make sense once you try to follow it and then the next plan will be better.

Keep going and keep improving as you go. You can watch as many videos of other people riding bikes as you can but you won’t ever learn it until you try it yourself.