Why planning out your goals can be a huge waste of time.

“I can provide the step by step process to making you rich!” – Random bad guru

The problem with step by step guidance is by the time you’re making through the process, things have changed so dramatically that the steps aren’t relevant any more. Unless you’re making a cake and need a step by step recipe, this process isn’t going to work because long term goals have the landscape change so much in the process of going through those steps.

Mapping out an exact plan should only be done to test the viability of a goal – Truth cake.

If your goal is to make $500,000 a year, and you can’t figure out how selling worms is going to get you there when you try to lay out a map to get to that goal, then you know your goal is probably not viable. Mapping out a plan to get to your goal will simply tell you if your goal is rationally possible.

For goals that can be achieved faster than the possibility that the environment changes (like making a cake), then figuring out the precise steps is a fine idea.

However…

It’s far better to be adaptable, know where you’re going, and know that the goal is viable via a potential plan (that will never go as planned), than to try to anticipate every potential thing that may go wrong and have a perfect preplanned response to everything. – Truth Cake

What’s something you wanted to do where you tried to plan every step of the process, only to find that the economy / environment / etc had changed midway through the executing, rendering the plan far less valuable?