A Bad Plan Executed with Excellence is Still a Bad Plan
The Amplified Impact Podcast
August 15th, 2023
Today, I want to dive into a topic that’s probably holding many of us back from making progress on our goals: overplanning.
We’ve all been there, right?
That feeling that we need to have everything mapped out perfectly before we can take that first step. But while having a solid plan is important, it’s not the be-all and end-all.
I’ve learned this from personal experience, especially when I teamed up with my entrepreneur buddy Ryan.
He had this innate bias towards action…he would fire away and then worry about aiming.
Ryan’s strategy was “fire bullets, not cannonballs.” This meant rapidly launching minimum viable products and learning from real-world feedback.
The moral of the story? Execution trumps planning.
Sure, you need a decent plan, but don’t let the pursuit of perfection paralyze you.
Embrace the power of action, take those shots, and then adjust as you go.
And yes, it might feel uncomfortable, but it’s the path that leads to growth and achievement.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“In so many areas of life you can only plan so much. Like you don’t know what’s going to happen until you get into the arena. And so your best spent time is getting into the arena as quickly as possible.”- Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino:
So I think one of the things that holds us back often from taking action towards our goals is this feeling that we haven’t sufficiently planned, we haven’t sat down and really mapped out how we plan to get from point A to point B. We haven’t really thought through all the different things that might happen. And as a result, because we haven’t done the, the planning to perfection, we don’t feel ready. We, we feel like, oh, maybe just a little bit more. I just need a little bit more information. I just need to spend a little bit more time brainstorming this, a little bit more time vision questing and then I’ll be ready. I’ll be ready then to take action once the plan is set. And on the one hand, I do think having a plan is a great thing, right? I truly believe that a bad plan executed with excellence is still a bad plan, right? So we don’t necessarily want to move forward with a bad plan.
Anthony Vicino:
But the crazy thing is that a bad plan executed with excellence is better than no plan. And it will get you further in a lot of cases than the guy or the gal who has a great plan but terrible execution. So, like, in my experience, the more important variable in the equation of will you ultimately be successful? Isn’t the quality of your planning. Often it’s the quality of the execution that matters far, far more. And the only way that you can know what the quality of the execution is going to be or to start to iterate and improve it over time is to actually take action towards the thing, start putting the plan into effect, so to speak. And I wanted to talk about this because I think planning is one of those things that we all, if left to our own devices, when we’re moving towards big, hairy audacious goals, will spend more time than is strictly necessary, like trying to get everything fine tuned before we take that first action. So it becomes this forcing function for procrastination. And the people that I know that have been the most successful, they move forward quickly without having a very well articulated plan at all.
Anthony Vicino:
In fact, one of my first exposures to what I would consider like a natural born entrepreneur was my buddy Ryan, who I worked with at Escape Climbing. Ryan has been, I don’t know, man, this guy, he’s just been building and selling things since he was a little kid. He is just a natural entrepreneur who is always just a merchant, like the very definition of a merchant, a salesperson. And he had the most insane bias towards action that I’ve ever seen. And in the beginning when him and I were working together, it was actually very stressful for me because I was much more on the, hey, let’s be diligent and really plan out what we’re going to do before we move forward. Let’s make sure we’ve done our market research and have all their ducks in a row. And this dude, he would just fire. What’s that phrase people say, Ready, fire, aim.
Anthony Vicino:
That was him in a nutshell. He would fire, fire, fire, and then worry about aiming. But one of the things that he did really well is to recognize that a bias towards action, it can get you killed if you just run into battle all willy nilly, right? Like, you do want to have some semblance of a plan. Or if you don’t, then make sure that at least what you’re running towards doesn’t have the capacity to kill you. And this was something that Ryan did very well. He did something called firing bullets, not cannonballs, which is an idea that we got from the book Good to Great by Jim Collins. He talks about how in the old pirate days, the old nautical times, if you were in your boat and you saw another boat on the horizon is coming towards you, and you see them waving like the Jolly Roger, and you’re like, oh, shit, those are pirates are coming for us. We need to fight them.
Anthony Vicino:
Well, you would be very foolish just to start firing your cannons at them because you haven’t yet triangulated where they are in relation to you. And you only have a finite number of cannonballs on your ship, right? Like, you don’t have an infinite supply, so you need to make those bad boys last. And so, because they take up a lot of space, they’re very heavy. You carry a limited number of cannonballs, but what you do have is a lot of bullets because they’re small, they don’t carry a lot of weight, and they kind of fly in a very similar pattern to a cannon that you can triangulate. And so instead of firing your cannons at the oncoming ship, you first fire bullets at them, and you fire the bullets until you hit, and then from there, you triangulate, and then you fire your cannons. And the way that we thought about this was the bullets are how do we know that we have a good product, we have a good market, and we have the capacity to fulfill to that market? Those are the three things that you really need. And so when we would launch products, we would move very quick to make minimum viable products. And in the beginning, what was stressful to me is that these products seemed too minimal.
Anthony Vicino:
The phrase that you hear people say is that if you’re not embarrassed of your first product or the first iteration, then you waited too long to ship. And that was the truth of our situation that I only realized years later, which was that we were doing it right. It just felt so wrong because it was like it really felt like we should perfect this. We should spend more time planning. But we learned so much by moving quickly taking that minimum viable product, putting it out into the marketplace and then just seeing does it sell? Are people interested? What are the complaints or the feedback or the positive takeaways that people had around this product? In a lot of cases what we found is that the things that we spent more time trying to vet and trying to plan out perfectly, they ended up doing worse than the products that we just moved very, very quickly, pushed to market and then took the feedback and iterated very quickly on. It’s very interesting and it flies in the face of my personality, but it’s something that I’ve gotten much better at through my entrepreneurial career, is moving fast, having that bias towards action, not overly planning things. Because again, a bad plan executed with excellence beats no plan and it also beats a great plan with poor execution. And so really focus on the execution side more so than the planning side because you don’t know what your customer wants.
Anthony Vicino:
In so many areas of life, this isn’t just for business, but in so many areas of life you can only plan so much. Like you don’t know what’s going to happen until you get into the arena. And so your best spent time is getting into the arena as quickly as possible. Again, assuming that you’re not going in there and there’s gladiators with axes and swords just ready to chop you into pieces, you have to have a bias towards action, towards the things that aren’t going to kill you or maim you. And so that’s where judgment comes in. But I wanted to share this because I’ve been thinking a lot about it recently. Somebody the other day on LinkedIn said something that I agreed in theory with it, but the problem was that they were putting strategy and execution on the same level. They were saying that both were equally important.
Anthony Vicino:
And I just don’t think that’s true. I think the strategy is actually secondary to the execution. If you have great execution, you can do a whole lot more than if you have a great strategy, but just terrible, terrible execution, like a great strategy with terrible execution is just, it usually is going to be very tough. Not always the perfect place to live is where you have a great strategy matched with great execution. But if I had to choose one, I would take the great execution over the great strategy and then over time try to iterate towards making it a better strategy. So hopefully this brings you a little bit of insight, a little bit of value, or at least a different perspective. Love to hear your guys’insights of what do you think on this topic? Let me know in the comments. Shoot me a DM.
Anthony Vicino:
I am all around the places. On Twitter, on Instagram, at Anthony Vasino, or at the Anthony Vasino on Instagram. Come find me. Love to chat with you guys but I’ll see you guys tomorrow. Until then, stay hyper focused, my friends.
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