Battle Planning...

You know how good it feels to lay out a strategic plan with multiple inter-dependent steps that result in key milestones culminating in the realization of some good and noble objective? 

Yeah, me either. But I’m a big fan of it in theory.

I’ve been knocking around a post about goals. I kept taking a crack at it because I think it’s important, but it was a tale of failure and woe, and to be honest, it’s getting a little tedious writing about all the times I screwed up in the past. However, I will say this about goals and objectives: they’re essential if you want more than whatever happens with no effort or discipline, but to achieve them, you need to base your base your daily activity on actions, not outcomes. 

“I will do X, Y, and Z every day until DATE.” 

Not “I will achieve A by DATE.”

That tripped me up for years. Decades, actually. I never - or rarely - laid out and followed through with the steps to get there. One moment of resistance could send me down a whole other path, and when the deadlines for the big goals came and went (often without me even remembering them until later). I’d get depressed and demoralized. It happened again and again and again.

It also didn’t help that I was throwing all my energy into things that I didn’t really want to do.  The moving company, MTB, was maybe the biggest time-suck of my life. I thought of it as a gift, and maybe something given by God to teach me something, (which I still do, actually, although the “what” has certainly evolved). So, I threw myself into it even though the whole operation was built on sand. And when it crashed, the name of the game became survival, which is not conducive to strategic long-term planning. 

It was during that time that I finally realized something: The whole reason we work backward from the big Goals and Objectives, or reverse engineering things, as they say, is that we are unable to maintain the big picture in our heads for long, sustained, productive times. We need to have a map, yes, but you can only focus on what’s right in front of you, and Resistance is guaranteed to throw everything it has at you during that time. 

I’d bet that if I’d been tracking it, the biggest crises happened immediately after finishing my most ambitious plans…

The most effective (and productive) I’ve ever been is when I can put myself on autopilot with daily work that is directly related to the end goal. The least productive times were when I’d fix the Big Goal in front of my mind and will/hope my way to it. When I know that this one thing, done consistently with all the excellence I can muster, is pointing me in the direction of that objective, it’s like detonating a thermobaric bomb in the “psychic space” around me. The result is clarity for miles. (Sure, maybe the landscape is filled with the smoking detritus of other ideas and distractions, but it’s worth it.)

That’s what this blog is mainly about. I’ve always wanted to “be a writer,” but one key thing missing is the belief, or rather the certainty, that I can discipline myself to produce a certain word count consistently. The blog is kind of an experiment, an exercise in taking action despite the goal being so far off and hidden behind a lot of fog. But here’s the thing - I know these small weekly actions are leading me to it.

I’ve already seen some small fruit of the effort - a relation of mine asked me to do a small copywriting project for him and it went well. And then there’s the whole grab bag of happy things that comes from consistently producing something whether you feel like it or not. (I’m not saying it’s high-quality stuff, but it’s at least stuff!). 

I’ve been thinking about these things all weekend. I took a couple of hits last week that almost knocked me off track. There were some personal things relating to The Situation, but I also had this horrible feeling that this little blog is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done. Doubt hammered me.

And then I saw the old black dog sniffing along the trail behind me, and I admit it - I panicked a little bit. 

The cure: recommitting, planning, and now: doing. 

It helped that my oldest son needed some direction of his own. He’s in the midst of building a little YouTube hustle. Two things about it pegged my “father’s pride” needle all the way to eleven: One, he’s been consistent with it for a long time - at least a year. Two, he’s starting to get some massive numbers with it. One of his YouTube shorts got more than 1100 views. Putting aside my concerns about this “indoors kid” living more deeply in the digital world, I can appreciate the actual success he’s having - far more than some adults who struggle to build an audience. Ahem.

We grilled out at a friend’s house yesterday, and while he helped me prepare some ribs, we talked about what we were going to accomplish this week. This week he’s going to produce three new videos and a couple of YouTube shorts.

The kid is inspiring. 

For my part, I’m going to write three posts with an audio version of each. (The audio is an experiment - let me know if you like that medium.) If time allows (and I have to hedge it a bit here because time is short), I’ll produce some Instagram Reels based on the posts as well. And for the other creative side, I’m going to finish a leather journal project for a young lady who always has pen and paper in hand. 

I’ll maintain my daily prayer and workout routines as usual.

Discipline. Consistency. Action. That’s really all there is to it. It’ll get you there, even if the “there” isn’t quite where you expected.

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Thanks for reading! If you think it might have value for someone else, please share. Likes and comments are helpful, too.

I’m trying something else out here this week. There will be an accompanying audio component following this post. It’s just me reading the post, but I have some ideas about leveling up the production. Maybe I’ll even turn it into an official podcast (yikes.) I won’t send that via email - I despise all the email I get, and don’t want to inflict more on someone else - so if you’re interested, just visit the main page and you can find it.

Thanks again!

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