I was about to launch a bad idea. I asked people who had already done what I was aiming at. That saved me a quarter of the work.
If the word strategy makes you think of a stale conference room, stay with me. Strategic planning is goal setting on steroids. You build a roadmap from where you are right now to where you want to be, so your hours go to the right work. A packed calendar can still be aimed at nothing useful. The roadmap is what aims it.
Five steps. Vision. Research. Strategy. Execution. Review.
Get the vision specific or it stays a wish. Do the research or the strategy is a guess. Track a trend line during execution or one bad day turns into a panic. Review, or you run the same play again.
1. Vision
Can a stranger tell whether you hit your goal?
A fitness vision used to be “I want to be in shape.” That sentence has no finish line. A measurable target does. You can measure it, and the measurement ends the debate. Money works the same way. “I want to be rich” invites you to move the target. “$100k in savings” holds still. Brooks applies the same standard to business income. A fuzzy income goal keeps shifting. A specific income figure becomes a destination you can plan against.
Specificity beats ambiguity. The more specific and quantifiable the vision, the higher the probability of success, because interpretation errors disappear. You and anyone helping you are pointed at the same outcome.
Run a Specificity Audit on your current Q4 goals. Any goal you couldn’t score as done or not done gets rewritten as a number.
2. Research
Who has already done the thing you’re about to attempt?
Research is the step most people skip. Skip it and you spend your time reinventing the wheel.
Gather the data. Then talk to humans who have already achieved your goal. Googling turns up articles. A conversation with someone who has done the thing turns up a proven model. Clarity.fm lets you pay for 15 minutes of an expert’s time. YouTube and online forums are the free route to the same kind of model. Both beat guessing.
I saved a quarter of the work by asking before I launched. I kept the quarter I would have spent on that bad idea.
List 3 people or resources you can consult for your current goal. Write the names down today. An empty list means you’re still guessing.
3. Strategy
Where are you starting from? If you can’t answer that, the path in your head is a wish with steps.
Strategy is the bridge between your vision and your current reality. You need the starting point before a strategy is valid. Say you’re in Vancouver and the vision is Rome. Walking there shows up as an option. Look at your constraints and it drops off the list. Time. Money. Skills. Define those and the unrealistic routes go away. What remains is a path you can actually walk.
Jumping straight to tactics skips this. Tactics feel faster. They often describe a trip that starts in a city you’re not in.
Conduct a Current State Audit before you plan your next quarter. Write the constraints in plain language. Cross off every option they make unrealistic.
4. Execution
Brooks planned his epic train journeys by anchoring them to events already on the calendar. He linked a new strategic goal to an event that was going to happen anyway. Execution got automatic. The mental load of starting dropped. Habit stacking, pointed at a big goal.
Identify one anchor event in your calendar and use it to trigger your next big project. Something already booked. The goal attaches to it, and starting takes less willpower.
Check your numbers with a trend line while you execute. A single data point lacks context. One bad day can make you freak out. One good day can hand you false confidence. A number on any given morning bounces. The same number, plotted over time, shows the real direction. Use that view on a business metric. Dojo members on one day will spook you or flatter you. The trend line shows whether you stick to the plan through a minor fluctuation or adjust because the trend has shifted the wrong way.
Set up a simple dashboard with trend lines for your key metrics. Read the line at your check-ins. Stay with the plan while the trend holds.
5. Review
When did you last review a finished project on purpose?
Review is the primary engine for growth. Making the same mistakes repeatedly means you need more review, done sooner. Expect some emotional resistance. Looking at what failed feels like a verdict. Debug the system. The result came from a process. Change the process and the next result changes with it.
Ask three questions. What went well? What didn’t go well? What can be done better next time? You move from opinion to evidence-based improvement. The next cycle gets better because of it.
Schedule a 30-minute review session for your last completed project. This week. Write the three answers. Build the next cycle from that page.
Download the AE Strategic Planning Template and run one goal through all five steps before you add anything else to your list.
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