مهارت اول: برنامه‌ریزی

SKILL 1:

PLANNING

The first time Dave and I went to Amsterdam, we got lost.

We were a young married couple, and neither of us had ever traveled to Europe before. We made all the classic mistakes: we packed too many countries into too few days, we went to every tourist location the world has ever known, we lived in fear of the “gypsies” who might steal our worldly possessions and so, though it pains me to admit it to you, we wore our passports and money under our clothes in special Velcro pouches created specifically for this purpose. Bless.

On that trip we went to London and later explored Rome and Florence and got trapped in Venice during an Italian transportation strike. But before that happened, there was Amsterdam.

I will be fully transparent. We added Amsterdam to the list because the child-nerds that we were thought it would be cool to go to a country where you could get a cup of coffee and legal marijuana at the same establishment. Did either of us smoke marijuana or even eat it inside brownies? No. Which was why it felt illicit enough to visit an entire country for just this purpose. In our defense, this was circa 2005, so marijuana wasn’t easily available like it is today. Also, we were idiots. But back to Amsterdam.

We flew from London to Amsterdam on Ryanair—basically an aerodynamic cardboard box with all the luxury amenities of a medieval oubliette—but on our way in to land, the plane reared us back up into the sky. The fog was too thick, apparently, and we had to be rerouted. If you’re young, you’ll have to imagine a time before smartphones existed—the rest of us still have nightmares about those days, but we were in the thick of it. We were rerouted to—wait for it—an entirely different country! I honestly don’t know how this is possible, but it’s true. Rather than landing in Amsterdam, we landed in Frankfurt. Germany.

Y’all, I did not have a German translation book. I did not have Lonely Planet’s guide to Germany with all the helpful little English phrases, because I never intended to go there. We were so stinking confused.

Somehow, through many questions and even more pantomiming, we gathered that we’d now be getting on a bus. An honest-to-goodness bus that would then drive us into Amsterdam. The bus was crammed to the gills with Europeans in giant parkas to contend with the winter temps. It smelled like my minivan after a half-full bottle has been allowed to bake inside it undetected in the Texas heat—sour and wrong. We were nauseated and not entirely positive that this was really where we were supposed to be. Next came the train. In retrospect, I’m not even sure how we made it this far. Maybe we just blindly followed the other people on the airplane/bus right onto that train, but one way or another we were finally on our way to Amsterdam. When we arrived in the city, we walked out of the train station with no clue how to get to our hotel. We had a printout of the name and the address, and we just sort of awkwardly asked one person after another.

“Do you know how to get to this hotel?” That person didn’t speak English. We tried another.

“Excuse me, do you know how to get to this hotel?” Another confused person who couldn’t answer us.

Person after person either didn’t understand what we were asking or answered us in a language we couldn’t decipher. We flagged down a taxi and showed him the address.

“Amsterdam,” he told us.

“Yes! Yes, sir. Amsterdam! Can you take us?” We were exhausted and at this point had been asking people (while towing our suitcases behind us) for nearly an hour.

“Amsterdam,” he said again, and when we just looked at him, confused, he drove off.

We started asking every person we passed until finally, blessedly, we found a man who spoke broken English.

“Sir, do you know how to get to this hotel?” I pointed emphatically at the address on my now wrinkled and dirty paper.

He looked at the paper, then back at us, then at the paper again. “Yes. Is Amsterdam.”

“Yes, we know.” I pointed to the streets around me. “Which direction? How do we get there?”

“Is Amsterdam,” he said again.

I wanted to scream or cry, and he must have sensed my growing distress, because he stiltedly fought his way through his response.

“Hotel is Amsterdam,” he told us. “You are here.”

Horror started to dawn on me. “Where is here?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “Not Amsterdam.”

You guys, we weren’t even in the right city.

We were still two hours away from it. Likely we were supposed to get on another train to take us there, but we didn’t know. We were sheep; we followed the crowd. What was supposed to be a two-hour flight ended up being an entire day of planes, trains, and automobiles, and we didn’t get to the hotel until it was too late to do anything. I’m sure God was trying to keep me from ingesting illicit baked goods on foreign soil, but the point is still the same.

The first step toward achieving your goal is to know where you’re headed. The problem is that often people think that’s all they need to know. They forget one crucial piece of the puzzle: a map only works if you know both your end and your starting point. Said another way, you cannot get to where you want to go if you don’t know where you are.

You need a road map. You need a starting point. You need a finish line. You need to know the guideposts and mile markers along the way. You need a plan of attack. You can talk about the things you want for your life every single day. I’m sure you can even find friends who will go to coffee with you and daydream and brainstorm, but none of that matters if you don’t actually develop a real plan to get you where you want to be. People don’t get lost because they’re not sure where they want to go. People get lost because they start out on a path and don’t keep checking to make sure they’re still headed in the right direction.

How often do you set out on a road trip without a map or directions? The only time we do that is if we don’t care where we end up—we just want to take a drive and listen to music and see what we find. But if we actually have somewhere we want to be, if we actually have a destination in mind, we always have a map. Why? Because a map can get us there faster and more efficiently. Because when we see something from a ten-thousand-foot view, we’re able to plan for and anticipate things that might pop up along the way. It’s much harder to have any kind of real strategy when you’re on the road.

I have used this road-map strategy for every major work project or personal goal I’ve taken on over the last fifteen years. It’s how I landed all my major clients in the event industry. It’s how I booked press for myself without a publicist and used that exposure to propel my career. It’s how I trained for a 10K, then a half marathon, and finally a full marathon. It’s how I wrote my first book and got my first book deal. It’s the strategy and intention behind everything in my life from products to relationships, and I’m convinced there isn’t anything it couldn’t work for. It’s not complicated; it only has three components. The trick is to approach these elements out of the usual order we expect them to be in.

See, we’re taught to start at one, then get to two, then end up at three. This is incredibly confusing if you don’t know what step two is. And how are you supposed to know what the steps are if you’ve never taken them before?

I’ve found that if I flip the order and start with the finish line, then contemplate where I’m starting from, I can more easily define the steps in the middle that will take me from one place to another.

Here’s how I do it:

THE FINISH LINE

First of all, you’ve got to start at the end. Counterintuitive, perhaps, but super effective in figuring out what direction your path should go. By now we’ve done enough work together that you should already have one clear and defining objective, one goal you’re focused on right now. That’s where you start.

To give you an idea of exactly how I’ve used this road-map strategy, I’m going to share a personal goal of mine from the past. I wanted to have a cookbook. I was a food blogger at the time, and having a cookbook felt like the ultimate goal! That was my finish line. I figured out my very specific what by zeroing in on my very specific why. I wanted a product for my fans that would commemorate my family recipes and be a first product offering that was in line with my brand at the time.

THE STARTING POINT

Now that you know where you want to go, you need to practice some self-awareness and be really honest about where you’re starting from. What assets, resources, and habits do you currently have that are going to help you with your journey? How can you expand on them and use them for exponential growth? What habits do you have that might derail you or push you off course? How can you be intentional in planning around those in advance so they don’t sneak up on you? What good habits could you develop to replace those negative ones? My starting place for my cookbook was great. As a food blogger I knew photographers and designers and a food stylist to help me make it all look incredible. What I didn’t have was a literary agent or experience in the cookbook space. I was super honest with myself about what I did and didn’t have access to, and then I got to work!

THE GUIDEPOSTS + MILE MARKERS

Now that you know where you’re going and you know where you’re starting, the next step is a brainstorm of every single thing you can think of that might help you get closer to the goal. And a great brainstorm always starts with great questions.

For instance, how could I get a cookbook deal? At the time I had no idea, so I headed over to Google (I swear to you, the answer for literally everything exists on the internet for free), and I asked that exact question. There were all kinds of answers, and I wrote down each and every one in a big idea soup—that’s what I call my written brainstorm sessions, because they always look like a big messy bowl of possibility. Anytime I’m creating a soup, my goal is to find at least twenty ideas for how I’m going to get there. I put down anything I can think of, and since it’s a brainstorm, I don’t debate whether the idea is good. I just write it down.

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Write a book proposal, get a literary agent, grow my social media following, establish myself as an expert in this field, research book proposal, hire graphic designer, hire photographer, do recipe testing, and so on.

The problem with stopping at this soup, besides the fact that it’s overwhelming, is there are too many possible directions to head. We want to create a clear direction, and this brainstorm page, while awesome to get your wheels spinning, is likely to create a lot of stops and starts and unproductive attempts. So, in order to move forward, we’ve got to get it organized. The question is, How do we do that? The answer is, surprisingly, with another question.

Look at your brainstorm and ask yourself, of all the ideas you’ve got there, what are the three major things that, if you actually achieved them, they would—without question—get you to your goal? Getting from twenty ideas down to three might seem impossible, especially since so many of them would be helpful, but I’m convinced that if you force yourself to come up with only three, those three will be the guideposts you’ll need to get you back on track if you get lost along the way. How do you choose your three? Go to your end goal and ask yourself, What is the step that comes just before this? Then choose two more guideposts working back from there.

The thing about a guidepost is that it’s something you cannot easily achieve without taking a bunch of other steps to get you there. People often hesitate to write these down, because they seem nearly as impossible as the dream itself. Their brains immediately start coming up with all the reasons that it’s going to be impossible to achieve. Maybe they’re like, “Sure, sure, sure. I can write down the thing, but eventually reality creeps back in, and my negative self-talk creeps back in, and I don’t know how I’m going to get there, and gosh, I’d like to do this thing, but I don’t . . .” No, no, no, no. Don’t focus on the lack. Don’t worry about how you’ll hit each guidepost. How will stop you dead in your tracks. Obsessing over the how is what stops us from going anywhere. Right now we’re not focused on the how; we’re focused on the what. As in, what steps do I need to take to make this goal a reality?

For my publishing journey, my road map started to take form when I forced myself to come up with my three guideposts. The very last step before getting a deal for publishing a cookbook is submitting a proposal to publishing houses: guidepost number three. Okay, so what’s the step before that? Well, Google told me that in order to submit to a publishing house, I had to have a literary agent. No publisher will just blindly accept a manuscript off the street, so finding a literary agent became the second guidepost on my map. Then I asked myself what I would need to secure a literary agent. There are so many ways to land one, but they all had one central thing in common: I’d need to create a proposal of some kind to explain what I wanted to do. That became the first guidepost in my road map.

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I had a starting point and an ending point and three major guideposts on the way. Now, now I was able to figure out the how, or, as I like to call them, the mile markers. I had forced myself to come up with three major guideposts, but the mile markers can be numerous because these are all the little things, all the hows you’re going to need to figure out and do to get you to that next guidepost.

To identify them, you start at the beginning of your road map for the first time since you began laying it out, and you do another idea brainstorm with this question: What do I need to do to get from my starting point to my first guidepost? I suggest putting on some pump-up music and writing as much as you can as fast as you can, anything that pops into your head. Don’t even think about it. Just write down every idea you can think of that in any way could help you get to your first guidepost. I call this a possibilities list.

Let’s say your goal is to start a wedding planning business (yes, I’m writing what I know), which means that your third guidepost would be to land some clients. Well, then your second guidepost would be to make sure your potential clients know about your business: you’ll need a portfolio, an Instagram account, or a website where potential brides can see your work. Of course, none of that matters if you don’t have any work to show off, so your first guidepost has to be the creation of that content. Since I have made this exact possibilities list to get me to this exact guidepost, I can tell you that the questions I asked myself along the way looked like this: How do I get content? Photographers? Florists? Should I partner with someone to design and produce different looks? Could I volunteer my time with other wedding planners in exchange for photos in my portfolio? How have other people created portfolios? Are there books I could read on this topic? Are there influencers I can follow who are talking about this subject?

Whenever I’m not sure how to get to the next step, even today, I create a possibilities list and fill up pages and pages with things like, “Oh, yeah. Sarah’s cousin works for that company that I’ve been dying to have as a client.” There were many times when I didn’t remember I had a connection until I sat down and made my list. This happens because we spend so much time sitting in what we don’t have that we don’t realize the access we actually do have.

WARNING: this is often the place where the dreamers start wandering off the side of the highway to gather wildflowers rather than making any real traction toward their destination. For example, if my first guidepost is clearly “create a book proposal,” there are all sorts of things I could brainstorm to get me there: researching book proposals, creating a Pinterest board of ideas, finding out the structure of a book proposal for this genre, talking to authors in this space and asking them for advice, finding a graphic designer to help me lay it out, taking an online course to learn about book proposals, going to a writer’s conference, and so forth. Most people see this list and get excited, thinking, Holy crap, look at all these ideas! Simultaneously they convince themselves that all ideas are created equal and all of them will be effective. Don’t get it twisted! Not all of these ideas will get me anywhere closer to my goal, but many of these ideas are way sexier and way more fun than the tasks that actually will get me there.

Creating a Pinterest board? That’s so fun. I think I’ll do that. Oooh, and a writer’s conference? I’ve always wanted to go to one of those. And brainstorming with my new friends from my writing club? That’s perfect! We convince ourselves that all of these are great ideas and that we’re spending dedicated time working toward our guidepost, when really we’re just walking around in circles. If I’m being honest with myself, I know the exact step that comes right before creating a book proposal. I don’t want to do it because it’s the hardest, suckiest part of writing a book, but I know what it is. I’ve got to actually write the words.

I want to encourage you here, because if you’re being realistic then you must realize that a big part of the reason you haven’t achieved the guidepost already is that your mile markers, while doable, take hard work. Mile markers are the achievable steps, and you can take one after another to get you to the destination. But they’re always work. Always.

As I sit writing this book, Girl, Wash Your Face has been out in the world for a handful of months. At this point it’s sold 722,000 copies and become a 1 New York Times bestseller, and I’ve received thousands and thousands of notes from women all over the world telling me how helpful it’s been in their lives. What a gift! What an incredible blessing that’s so big I couldn’t even have dreamed of it! Do you think that success makes it any easier to write this book? No. Writing is always hard for me. It’s always work. Even though I’ve done it so many times before, even though I’ve been able to experience success with it, even though I believe so deeply in what I’m writing about—even then it’s a slog to the finish line.

The idea is not that a road map will magically make the journey easier; the idea is that a road map will make the journey effective. I believe deeply in what you’re capable of. I think you can achieve anything you set your mind to, but you’ve got to set your mind to it. You’ve got to be relentless in your pursuit and flexible in your methods.

So buck up, and start creating the mile markers that will get you to each guidepost. If you’re not sure what they are, then ask yourself better questions. For instance, if my question is “How can I sign with a literary agent?” my answer at the time would have been “I have no idea!” Which gets me exactly nowhere. But if I change the question to, “Who might know how I can get a literary agent?” or “Where could I research to find out the answer?” or “Are there books or podcasts or YouTube videos about this?” then suddenly my answers are endless. Remember, if you’re not getting effective answers, it’s because you’re not asking effective questions.

Also, don’t get freaked out about all the possibilities. This goal of yours is going to feel like something gigantic when you begin. Remember how to eat an elephant? One bite at a time! When you’re first starting to work toward a goal, it’s so easy to get overwhelmed. There are so many things to do and never enough hours to do them. If you’re like me, you have eighteen to-do lists going, and they’ve got everything on them. If it feels overwhelming, it’s because you’re trying to do too many things at one time. Slow down. Make a daily list. Make a weekly list. Make a monthly list. Now double-check them. Is everything on those lists essential to helping you get to the next guidepost? If not, revise and refocus.

Now you’ve got your road map. The next step is almost as important as figuring out the rest of it. In between you and the goal that you’ve always wanted are three words. Maybe you write them down on a sticky note. Girl, maybe you should get it tattooed on your body, but it’s this simple: go all in.

Go all in. Take massive action immediately. Not on Monday, not at the new year, not next month, but right now, today. Take massive action on the first mile marker on your road map.

By the way, creating a road map in the first place is going to be a massive action for many of you. But please don’t stop there! Stay in. For a lot of people, it’s easy for them to go all in; they just don’t stay there. Something will happen and life gets in the way, and they fall off the wagon and think, Ugh, now it’s all downhill.

No. No! Sister, half the battle in between you and where you want to go is just your willingness to stand back up. Everybody falls down, everybody slips up, everybody makes mistakes, everybody gets off course. Plenty of people set out headed toward their goal—they’ve got their road map, they’re following along—and then all of a sudden something happens. Maybe it’s something simple like slipping off their diet. Maybe they miss one week of training and then it’s two, and suddenly a whole month is gone. Maybe it’s been six months or six years since they sat down at their computers to write. Whatever has happened, whatever you did or didn’t do, shame isn’t the answer to overcoming it. It’s done, it’s in the past, and beating yourself up about it won’t change anything. Not only is that true, but so is the fact that it’s not a life sentence. Anything other than death is temporary. The problem is that you’re letting a short-term choice become your long-term decision. You believe that what happened in the past is who you are. That’s BS.

Who you are is defined by the next decision you make, not the last one. So get planning, make your road map, and take the next step.