It doesn’t take much time to design a good plan - literally just hours spread out over days or weeks - and whatever amount of time you spend designing it will be only a small fraction of the time you spend executing it. But designing is very important because it determines what you will have to do to be effective. Most people make the very big mistake of spending virtually no time on this step because they are too preoccupied with execution.
People successful with this stage have an ability to visualize and a practical understanding of how things really work.
People who worry about looking good typically hide what they don’t know and hide their weaknesses, so they never learn how to properly deal with them and these weaknesses remain impediment in the future.
I have never meet a great person who did not earn and learn their greatness. They have weaknesses like everyone else - they have just learned how to deal with them so that they aren’t impediments to getting what they want. In addition, the amounts of knowledge and the capabilities that anyone does not have, and that could be used to make the best possible decisions, are vastly greater than which anyone (no matter how great) could have within them.
It is a fundamental law of nature that to evolve one has to push one’s limits, which is painful, in order to gain strength - whether it’s in the form of lifting weights, facing problems head-on, or in any other way.
Most people react to pain badly. They have “fight or flight” reactions to it: they either strike out at whatever brought them the pain or they try to run away from it. As a result, they don’t learn to find ways around their barriers, so they encounter them over and over again and make little or no progress toward what they want.
Most people don’t like reflecting on their weaknesses even though recognizing them is an essential step toward preventing them from causing them problems. Most people especially dislike others exploring their weaknesses because it makes them feel attacked, which produces fight or flight reactions; however, having others help one find one’s weaknesses is essential because it’s very difficult to identify one’s own. Most people don’t like helping others exploring their weaknesses, even though they are willing to talk about them behind their backs. For these reasons most people don’t do a good job of understanding themselves and adapting in order to get what they want most out of life. In my opinion, that is the single biggest problem of mankind because it, more than anything else, impedes people’s abilities to address all problems and it is probably the greatest source of pain for most people.
Aristotle defined tragedy as a bad outcome for a person because of a fatal flaw that he can’t get around. So it is tragic when people let ego barriers lead them to experience bad outcomes.
So what is success? I believe that it is nothing more than getting what you want - and that it is up to you to decide what that is for you. What is essential is that you are clear about what you want and that you figure out how to get it.
For most people success is evolving as effectively as possible, i.e., learning about oneself and one’s environment and then changing to improve. Personally, I believe that personal evolution is both the greatest accomplishment and the greatest reward.
I believe that evolution, which is the natural movement toward better adaptation, is the greatest single force in the universe, and that it is good. It is good because evolution is the process of adaptation that leads to improvement.
Success is achieved by people who deeply understand reality and know how to use it to get what they want. The converse is also true: idealists who are not well-grounded in reality create problems, not progress. For example, communism was a system created by people with good intentions who failed to recognize that their idealistic system was inconsistent with human nature. As a result, they caused more harm than good.
Creating a design is like writing a movie script in that you visualize who will do what through time in order to achieve the goal.