Plans Are Useless, Put Planning Is Essential

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On Tap In This Issue

• Plans vs Planning

• BFCM Postmortem

• It’s Giving Tuesday

• Thanks To Our Sponsor

Plans vs Planning

I have no idea if Eisenhower actually said “Plans are useless but planning is indispensable .” Nor do I know if he actually had anything to do with “The Eisenhower Matrix” either, but let’s roll with its authenticity.

My wife is a planner. She wants all the steps mapped out so that she doesn’t have to shoulder a cognitive load and make a decision in the moment. I want to know what we are trying to accomplish and am happy to make decisions on the fly.

We are pretty much opposites when it comes to planning. She needs it. I hate it because you can’t possible plan for every variable in advance - it just makes my brain hurt. Vacation planning is a real challenge in our house…

Because we apparently aren’t sick of each other after 24 years, we run into this planning thing a lot. I want to react, and she wants to “pre-act” (I just made that up - not bad, eh?)

But our planning tensions create really good outcomes…and secretly, I think we both imagine that it was our contribution to the planning or the in-game adjustments that made things turn out the right way.

We are both wrong.

When I freelance a plan on my own, I regularly run into something that I didn’t anticipate and have to make an in the moment call, and sometimes I just screw it up. When she is going solo, if she does run into an issue that she didn’t expect, often it throws her off her game and the fun is diminished a bit.

When we work together, via her pre-planning, we end up with tons of detail about options and solutions so we have a solid playbook. And if anything goes awry, since the outcome is well defined and we have playbooks to model against, together, we can make adjustments that are great.

So, before the end of the year, I want you to do as much preplanning as you can. Pre-act and know what your options are before you hit a wall. Planning is the structure that you build safely on. Inevitably, the plan isn’t going to go as well as you imagined, so you are going to have to react and make changes. This is the nature of the beast.

As entrepreneurs and company leaders, you have to get very comfortable with changing plans and uncertainty. But in order to thrive in a fluid environment, you have to put in the hard work of pre-act so that you can, in the moment, react in the best possible way.

BFCM Postmortem

BFCM was really pretty solid all around - Salesforce says that online sales were up 7% YoY. Adobe says 10.2%. Regardless, that was a pretty good result for those days. However, even though Cyber Monday online sales were at an all time high, some have opined that the Cyber addition to Black Friday may be losing some of its punch. This goes along with data showing that holiday sales have started earlier and maybe have pulled some dollars out of the market before the weekend ended. Regardless, the progenitor of Cyber Monday, Scott Silverman (good dude, btw) should be proud that his made up holiday is still driving sales.

How were your sales over the weekend?

It’s Giving Tuesday

Can you dig deep and think about providing financial support to:

• Pathfinder Learning Center: This 501c3 non-profit serves independent learners. It is a place of student led learning (which is marvelous…). It is an environment that allows kids to learn in their own way. As such, Pathfinder has an array of students - and many of whom have learning and social differences that made public school an impossible burden. Pathfinder is run by my wife, Julia Kelahan. She works without compensation and has a needs-blind admissions policy - she accepts all students, regardless of their ability to pay. The interest-led education that she is able to facilitate is life changing for kids who could not succeed in a traditional educational environment. Please consider making a donation today.

• The Trevor Project: In 2016, my daughter Charlotte, competed in Chopped Jr. (you can see the episode on YouTube or AppleTV (or if you don’t want to pay for it, there may be a copy somewhere). Spoiler alert - she won. And she donated almost all of her prize winnings to The Trevor Project - an organization that quite literally saves the lives of LGBTQ+ teens, tweens & young adults. They do amazing work.

• Buy Some Merch from We Rate Dogs: If you haven’t seen “…the dogs were good again this week…” guy on TikTok (and everywhere else) you are missing out on an easy way to support pets who need lifesaving medical procedures.

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