Recently on Facebook, TTN posted a link to an article titled, “Why Persistence Is Far More Important Than Planning” by Brent Gleeson. The article stressed the importance of not giving up. For your project to succeed, you must move beyond its planning phase. You will be met with challenges, struggles, and probably a few setbacks. Things will get dirty. But don’t give up.
In my college English courses, that was one of the tips that I learned. All writers want perfect writing, but when that desire for perfection results in stagnation, nothing (or very little) gets written. To prevent this, writers are often told to silence their inner editor and simply write.
You can always go back and edit what you’ve written. You can always make another draft. The point is to keep moving, even if you aren’t moving very quickly. This corresponds to a quote that Gleeson gives from Martin Luther King Jr. King said, “If you can’t fly you run, if you can’t run you walk, if you can’t walk you crawl. But no matter what, you keep moving forward.”
This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t prepare and plan. You must have a general idea of where you are going, but if you have to choose between two ditches to fall in, it’s better to fall into the ditch of doing something imperfectly than to the ditch of doing nothing. We will never do something perfectly, but each time we do something, we can learn and grow from the experience.
We will never develop a perfect plan. Gleeson writes that there will always be “many things out of your control.” In your planning phase of any venture, develop processes for responding to unknown circumstances. There comes a point in time that you need to execute your plan.
The fact is, the more you do something, the better you become at doing it. That is how we learn, whether it’s how to swing dance, speak for the first time, or throw a football. We need to comprehend the basics, practice, and learn from our mistakes.
-Tony Johns (Customer Account Manager)