[Episode #2] Plan Ahead | Small Town Bigger Dreams Podcast

By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. Benjamin Franklin. Why is it important to plan ahead? What has helped me and how you can plan ahead to make a difference in your life. Do you belong to a small town? Are you struggling to make it big in a big city? Do you want to learn principles to get to the next level? Well, you are at the right place. Welcome to the podcast Small Town Bigger Dreams, where I help you with some principles, guest interviews, and stories to help you make it big. Hello friends, my name is Haritosh Srivastav and I'm back with episode number 2 of Small Town Bigger Dreams. And today we are gonna talk about a very important aspect and that I call it as plan ahead. If you look at any world leader of any field you will find out that they spend a considerable amount of time planning ahead, planning for future, having the vision, what do they want to get out of their business, out of their team, out of the country. So it becomes very important that you plan ahead for your life. Now, if you know about Elon Musk, If you do not know, go and Google him. But if you know, you already know that he has a vision of setting up a society in Mars. I heard he's trying to do underground rail, underground road setup. That's the sort of vision and planning. Now here I'm not gonna ask you to plan for 20 years, uh, and make it successful. We are gonna talk about a few things that you can do to make your daily life or week successful. You might have heard this story of two woodcutters. Both of them were given the task of cutting a number of trees, and the person who will cut more trees, more trees will get rewarded. The first woodcutter immediately jumped to execution. He started cutting. He cut 1, 2, 3. By the end of the 4th tree, he was drained, he was exhausted, and he gave up. The second person, the second woodcutter, took the time to sharpen his saw. He spent about 70 to 80% of his time in sharpening his saw and then started cutting. And pretty soon he was way ahead of the second woodcutter and won the competition. So it's very important that we look at the plan ahead. We plan ahead of the time to make sure that no, we are not wasting our time. We are making the best use of our time. How do you do that? We're gonna talk about that in a minute. I wanted to bring up couple of my stories that has helped me. When I was in intermediate, I, I was studying from Hindi medium, but one of the things I think that really helped me was having the translation of key terms. Now this might seem like a very small thing, but remember, when you are joining engineering, you have to do everything in English. That time, knowing these key terms really, really helped me. The second example is during the college, during when I was doing engineering, I was pretty consistent in terms of the studying. So I was not— I was studying probably an hour to 2 hours every single day, and that helped me to keep the calm even during the main exams. While people were spending 14, 16 hours studying, I was spending pretty decent time and having good fun, rest, and that helped me be in my spirit and, and perform better in the exams. So if you look at closely, I was planning ahead of the time what is coming up, whether it is the engineering where I have to do everything English, or whether it's the main exam If I plan ahead and if I prepare ahead, I would be okay to give the exam without taking too much of stress. Now let's talk about what you can do to plan ahead. Now there are so many strategies that you can apply. I'm gonna talk about 2 strategies that you can use to— that you can use to plan ahead. Number 1, as I call it, as weekly plan. A weekly plan is something which you sit down on Saturday or Sunday or Monday morning and list down all the major activities that are coming up in that week and note it down. You can note it on a software on your laptop. I prefer to note it on a piece of paper. If you see here, there is a weekly plan for this week, and I have a number of things that I need to do, including this podcast recording. So that's number 1 that you can do, a weekly plan which you can refer over the week, and by the end of the week you can actually review and see what did you plan, what did you accomplish, and how you can make it better for the next week. Number 2, which is very famous but I still feel there is a lot of value, which is Daily to-do list. Every morning if you write down what are things that you're gonna accomplish, you may go at the higher level, put only 2 or 3 things, or you may go out at the finer level, put all the things that you plan. It can vary and you must experiment with what suits you best. But list down what are things that you want to accomplish. That really helps you to keep a control of your time. Many a times we get time but we do not know what to do, and vice versa, we have so many things and we do not know what to do, how to prioritize. So having a list in front of you helps you prioritize, and by the end of it you can also see that whether something was not required you did, or whether something is required you missed it, but that you can always come back and do it next day. So those are my 2 quick tips that you can use to plan ahead. So remember to have a weekly plan and a daily to-do list. If you incorporate, incorporate these, I am pretty sure you would be much ahead from where you are now. So this was episode 2, Plan Ahead, of the Small Town Bigger Dreams. I'm really looking forward to your feedback. Any question, if you're watching it on YouTube, put it in comments. If you have any other questions, you can reach out to me through my social media handles. I would be more than happy to help you, and I'm really looking forward to know what are other topics that you want me to cover. We have a few exciting episodes coming up too, so stay tuned and Lastly, a good news. Our podcast has been listed in Apple Podcast as well as on other. I would be putting a note in my YouTube channel. So if you are on Apple or Spotify or Google or any other podcast, you should be able to find me. So until next time, keep learning, keep growing, and keep going out of your comfort zone. This is Haritosh Srivastav, and I'll be back in 2 weeks with another episode of Small Town Bigger Dreams.