The Power of Learning from DAD

Lesson 9 – Planning – Part 1

To achieve success, you will need to create practical and workable plans. If the first plan that you adopt does not bring about the results you desire, replace it with a new practical and workable plan. If the second plan also meets with failure, that too must be replaced, and on goes the process of replacing plans until you hit upon a practical and workable plan that succeeds.

Here is the point at which most people meet with failure, claimed Napoleon Hill, they lack persistence in creating a new plan to take the place of those that fail; taking failure either to be evidence of their own lack of capacity to achieve the goal set or to be evidence that the goal set is, in fact, impossible to achieve. Neither is true. When your plans fail, this is only confirmation that the plan did not work, NOT that the goal was not attainable or that you do not have capacity to attain it.

If your plans fail, embrace the failure for what it is, a temporary setback, exercise the faculty of imagination to build new plans and start out again. In truth we should expect some temporary defeat, at least at the outset because temporary defeat is an essential feature of all success narratives. This is true if we are to study the lives of any successful individual whatsoever. We have a tendency, when we see successful people, to only see the success, disregarding all of the temporary defeats that they encountered. However, every person who has ever achieved any great success will have stories of temporary defeat, and an explanation of how they overcame this to arrive at new plans that eventually led to success. The key is to just keep going.

“Defeat is temporary. It simply a sign that your plans are not sound, and that it is time for you to try another plan”

There is another often overlooked feature of planning, and that is this: to effectively take the actions required by your plan, you will require excellent leadership skills. Here we are not talking about the ability to lead others, but the ability to lead yourself. Self-leadership is the discipline of self-control, it means giving yourself a command and following it. There are many principles of effective personal leadership, including operating with sympathy, doing more than you are paid for and making a committed decision. We will delve further into the leadership qualities that are essential to planning in the next video.

Lesson 9 – Planning – Part 2

There are several qualities that you will need in order to be able to execute your plan, including:

• Having a great eye for detail,
• Knowing what is core and what is incidental,
• Taking full responsibility for your results and,
• Having well developed leadership skills

The last quality – having well developed leadership skills – we have introduced in our previous video. There we said that self-leadership is essential to planning, and in this lesson, we will develop that idea further.

As far back as 1937 Napoleon Hill wrote that we are entering a new era in which the relationship between leader and follower is more like a partnership. This could not be truer. Leaders of our new era must operate by consent, and not by force, and they must have a range of qualities that characterize effective self-leadership.

Some of the leadership attributes we should pay close attention to cultivating now are described below. Each of these qualities will help you as a leader to execute the organised plans that you have devised to achieve your goals.

• Leaders must render humble service: Leaders should not feel above any role within the organization and should not be willing to ask individuals to do work that they themselves would not do.
• Operate without ego: As soon as arrogance or self-importance kicks in the partnership between leader and follower is scuppered as the leader has collapsed into ego. Effective leadership requires that we must act without ego.
• Equitable division of praise and profit: A leader that claims all the honor for the work of his followers and behaves selfishly is not a leader at all.
• Ability to apply knowledge: Leaders understand that men and women are paid not for what they know, but for what they can do with what they know. As it is the application of knowledge that holds most value, leaders should therefore expect compensation on the basis of what they are able to do with their knowledge.
• Taking advice from others: In order to execute plans you need the tools of application, including access to a mastermind group. You must be able to take advice from others so as to discover new insights and new ways of doing things.
• Not be limited by circumstance: Leaders do not let situations define them, as it is they who define situations. For example, a leader with a difficult background will not let that stop them from achieving. While the difficult background may have an impact, it certainly will not hinder them.
• Have a purpose: If you do not have a well-defined purpose, it is exceedingly difficult to execute plans as a leader.
• Emotional self-regulation: The ability to manage self or emotion are also important as these will allow you to be steady and focused in the face of change and in times of crisis.
• Manage associations: Wrongful associates in business or in private can also scupper things. Remembering to choose your associates wisely, the people leaders surround themselves with should be people they attract through their positive attitudes.

To summarise our planning lesson: once you set a goal organised plans are required, and action should be taken. If your plans do not bring about the desired result, it is important to replace the plan, and not the goal. This persistence is paramount. Over time what you learn through the execution of previous plans will enable you to devise smarter and better plans, which have a higher chance of success. Alongside this, one of the key features that will impact on your ability to effectively deliver plans is your ability to lead yourself. Take time to look at and apply the self-leadership skills identified above, they will support you to successfully execute your plans.