Being strategic is nothing more than taking literally 5 minutes to examine the problem of achieving your goal with an open mind, and translating that into next actions. The trouble is that most people don’t bother linking goals to actions at all, they’d apparently rather aimlessly wander through life seemingly hoping to end up at a goal state by random chance.
Fixing this requires two things: (1) an ability to admit you’re wrong (meaning what you are doing now, and what you have done in the past is/was not in fact effective at achieving your goals, and you should be doing something else instead), and (2) an ability to avoid bias in the brain storming process.
Suggested exercise: drop all preconceived notions of what you should be doing, and think for a literal five minutes—set a timer on your phone or something—doing nothing but enumerating possible pathways to achieving your goal. Do not evaluate, simply enumerate with pen and paper. When the buzzer goes off, evaluate and organize the options, then repeat, this time focusing on what tactics are necessary to implement the strategic pathways. After theroughly brainstorming at that level, make some decisions about which strategies and tactics to follow, for now, and repeat one more time the brain storming session, this time coming up with next actions.
This can take less than an hour, no matter the size of the goal. For example, it took me only 40 minutes to reduce “permanent and sustainable expansion of human settlements into the cosmos” to a next action related to Bitcoin commodity markets.
Being strategic is nothing more than taking literally 5 minutes to examine the problem of achieving your goal with an open mind, and translating that into next actions. The trouble is that most people don’t bother linking goals to actions at all, they’d apparently rather aimlessly wander through life seemingly hoping to end up at a goal state by random chance.
Fixing this requires two things: (1) an ability to admit you’re wrong (meaning what you are doing now, and what you have done in the past is/was not in fact effective at achieving your goals, and you should be doing something else instead), and (2) an ability to avoid bias in the brain storming process.
Suggested exercise: drop all preconceived notions of what you should be doing, and think for a literal five minutes—set a timer on your phone or something—doing nothing but enumerating possible pathways to achieving your goal. Do not evaluate, simply enumerate with pen and paper. When the buzzer goes off, evaluate and organize the options, then repeat, this time focusing on what tactics are necessary to implement the strategic pathways. After theroughly brainstorming at that level, make some decisions about which strategies and tactics to follow, for now, and repeat one more time the brain storming session, this time coming up with next actions.
This can take less than an hour, no matter the size of the goal. For example, it took me only 40 minutes to reduce “permanent and sustainable expansion of human settlements into the cosmos” to a next action related to Bitcoin commodity markets.
I suspect people actually have defined goals but are not specific enough about actions.
Oh I agree. As simple as it sounds, people lack procedures for turning goals into actions. It’s a major failing of our educational system.