the Future Financial Freedom group

Charles Noble once said ...

"You must have long range goals to keep you from being frustrated by short range failures."
Sometimes though, it isn’t easy to 'sell' long-range ideas or to spend effort in the hope of a long term return. We are more concerned with today’s results and gains than next year’s. For those of us living from hand to mouth, next year doesn’t exist! It’s an abstraction. All that matters is what you did yesterday and what you are doing today. This is a difficult paradigm for those of us who agree with Charles Noble and spend more time planning than actually executing.

Ideally, as a business, program or project manager, you want to split your time and strategies between winning today’s battles and planning your overwhelming victory sometime in the future. (Maybe in 6 months. Maybe in a year. Maybe in five years. Who knows.) My point is that you can’t put all of your eggs in the “today” basket or in the “tomorrow” basket. It can’t be an 80/20 split either. It really needs to be a 50/50 (or 60/40) split one way or another.

• If you spend considerably more time focusing on “today,” you will still be in the same spot a year from now – treading water – reacting to everything instead of influencing your business environment.
• If you spend considerably more time focusing on “tomorrow,” then your execution suffers, nothing gets done, and you’ll never reap the rewards of all that meticulous planning you spent so much time on.

This may seem like common sense to most of you, but I can assure you that for tens of thousands of business managers, the equation looks like 90/10 in favor of “today.” For these folks, “tomorrow” is something you might get to later, when you have a few minutes to breathe. This is not good.

• Do you wait until your car is completely out of petrol before getting a refill?
• Do you wait until you have a 42 degree fever before calling the doctor?
• Do you wait until the morning of a test before studying for it?

The world of business is no different!

Loosely based on an article by Olivier Blanchard