Ep 349 | James Clear's Thoughts on Early Action and Early Planning

Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. Let's get into it. Today I want to chat around something that I think all entrepreneurs— a choice, I would— I should say, that all entrepreneurs are faced with. And that is whether to take early action or to instead take early planning into account. What the heck am I even talking about? James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, he puts out a newsletter that I would encourage everybody listening to subscribe to. I believe it's called 321, I think is what he calls it. And James Clear, if you don't know, he wrote Atomic Habits. You've probably seen a lot of his work floating around the internet, shows up virtually everywhere. And that's 'cause the book is amazing. It's been a bestseller for years. And he's just a, he's an amazing guy that has a lot of great thoughts. Well, in his newsletter, I don't know, it was a couple of weeks ago, I was reading something that he had put together. And as I was reading it, I'm like, this is, This is me. This is something I've been faced with many a time. Sometimes I've made the right decision. Sometimes I've gone the wrong direction. And I think that my peers, those listening to the No Days Off podcast, probably could benefit from what James had to say here and think about this particular subject a bit differently. Let me, let me describe what's going on and then we could dig into it further. So James Clear wrote, and I'm going to read exactly what he stated. He said, "Some projects benefit from early action. If you're writing a book, it's easy to spend a lot of time brainstorming titles and dreaming up an outline, but it's better to simply write. The book discovers itself as you go. Yes, you'll need to go back and organize things, but this is easier to do once you have material. The key is to act first and then organize your thinking. Other projects benefit from early planning. The best way to build a skyscraper is to plan carefully. If you start placing steel beams on day one, you're guaranteed to run into problems. It is harder to make changes once you've begun. You'll need to tear it down and start over again. The key is to organize your thinking and then act. Do you need early action or early planning? All right, a lot to take in there. But in summary, what James is saying is that sometimes early action, just getting into motion, doing something, is what is necessary at that moment. And sometimes pausing and instead planning and strategizing before you take action is in fact what's necessary. I think the best entrepreneurs, the most successful people, probably have a better understanding as to when things require action, early action, or when things instead require early planning. I, I know there's been times in my life where I have done this right and where I've done it wrong. In business, for example, There are things in business where we can plan and strategize and think through and develop, you know, write out a, a whole, you know, structured play for the direction we're going to go and take time in doing that. But the reality is just getting something into motion and pivoting, if in fact we need to pivot, is a greater benefit than all of that planning. I'll give you an example. Like, in my, in my business, in one of the businesses that I run, the, the— we were business planning for the year, and, you know, we didn't really have all of the facts with respect to how we were going to generate business. We had a lot of good ideas, a lot of good theory, but we hadn't tested enough of the, the different paths we could take. We hadn't done enough testing. We didn't have enough data. We didn't have enough experience. And so we could have started by planning out and building around all the hypotheticals and, you know, basing things on our theory as well as the research we had done on others, or we can just immediately get into action and start split testing and see— seeing what worked and what didn't work. Well, in this particular scenario, that's exactly what we did. See, early planning just wouldn't have worked for us because we did not actually have enough data or have enough knowledge to plan around where we wanted to go. We had a vision, we knew where we wanted to go, but we didn't have the, the tools or the knowledge again to, to plan. So the best approach for us in that moment was to simply just get into action. And then after we were getting into action and data was coming in and we were understanding how the market was going to react to us, we got to go back and then we got to organize things. But it was easy to do once we had that data, once we had that material. So the key in this particular scenario was to act first and then organize our thinking. Now, in other areas of business, I can think about another business objective just recently where we were super anxious to just get moving. Like, let's just, we've been stagnant, we just got to get into action. And fortunately, we said, let's push pause. 2 or 3 or 4 weeks isn't going to kill us. We would benefit from a plan. The best way to build this particular business is going to be to plan carefully, because if we take action and make the wrong decisions, we would not get that time back, and we were guaranteed to run into problems, and it was going to be harder to make changes once we started because we'd have to tear it down and starting over again. It wasn't as easy as the first business I was describing. So in your business, if you're an entrepreneur listening to this podcast, there are probably scenarios where getting into action makes sense versus planning, and then vice versa. If your sales business, uh, has lost its momentum, has lost its mojo, is in a rut, you can plan your way out of that. I'm sure you can. But maybe you just need to get in the office tomorrow and create a new energy and a new buzz and get on the phone or go, you know, door knock or whatever it takes to change the attitude and the energy around that office. Create a contest and just get things moving, right? You don't have to knock it out of the park, but just changing the energy or the mood, changing the direction and creating momentum sparks this new, this new direction, right? And then you can plan accordingly. Now, if you're building out a new business or building out a new product or service, sure, you can test it, but the last thing you want to do is dive too far into that and find that you've wasted money and resources and all that. Now, when we think about health, there are times in health where you should plan out, hey, here's what my workout's gonna be, here's what my food plan needs to be, here's how I'm gonna sleep. And maybe you're gonna write all these things out, you're gonna map it out, and then you're gonna go execute on that plan. I think that that probably works for those that are already consistent in their approach to health. Maybe you already have a baseline, like a foundation for fitness, you're working out every day or every other day, or maybe you're already eating pretty well, you're not having to make massive changes, planning probably makes sense. But if you're sitting on the couch right now, I don't think you have to plan. I think you just get up and start getting active, right? By walking 10 minutes or 20 minutes. You didn't need a plan for that. Or if you know you're not eating well, change one thing on your plate starting today, right? So if you don't already have that foundation, just getting into action makes sense. If you have that foundation, maybe early planning instead makes sense. As it pertains to your relationships, if you've got a relationship that's sour, you can plan how you're going to turn that whole thing around, but maybe it just requires you getting into early action. Maybe it just takes an apology. Maybe it just takes a conversation to at least jumpstart things so that then Once you create new energy, you can plan versus planning around something that probably, probably needs you to get into motion right away before you can make a more complex or more complete plan around. Does that make sense? So, the thought today is really for you to think around in your world, right? In your life, in your business, in your relationships, in your health, in your wealth, Do I need early action? Do I need to just get in the motion right now, or do I need early planning? If you're not saving any money right now, maybe instead of planning out a whole wealth plan, how about we just take action around saving a dollar today, or $100 this month, or whatever the number is for you? Maybe it starts there, and then as we create new habits, new energy we can plan with a more complete data set. Makes sense? Something to think around today. Early action or early planning? That's all I have for you today, the No Days Off Podcast. Thank you so much for listening. And remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get after it.