How important is having a plan if you want to get anywhere in life?

How important is having a plan if you want to get anywhere in life? –@djmainevent

It is very important to have a plan. For instance, let’s say you want to be able to bench press 200 lbs. (I’m making this up, obviously. I never want to be able to bench press that). You won’t get there randomly. You first come up with the goal (“bench press 200 lbs”) and then with that goal in hand you know every day how you can slightly improve to meet that goal. How you can change your diet (more protein!), how you can get to a gym, what increments you need to take in order to bench 200 lbs, which muscles need to improve (there’s a billion little muscles around the shoulder that have to be worked on with different machines, etc). And so on.

I have about 8 goals that I’ve written down for 2012. I look at them every day. The goals might change. I might not stick with them. Or I might decide halfway through that I’m only going to focus on 4 of them. But each day I come up with the plan for that day that makes incremental improvement on all 8 goals. Those incremental improvements compound in your life exponentially the way money in a bank accumulating interest does. Before you know it, you are rich in the sense that you’ve achieved your plan. But without the plan, you are just flaying in the dark, with no money in your mental bank.