How To Make The Perfect Bad Plan

This video is for those of you who've never started anything on your own but really have the edge. You feel the urge to have something you can call your own, but you just don't know where or how to start. Well, this video is going to get you started in the right place.

You see, everything good starts with a bad plan and most cases, if you were to go back in time and do something all over again, you'd probably be at least twice as fast. You'd land that job way fast or you'd get that skill way faster and so on. So, by that logic, your original plan was not that great, but it led to something good. Great job.

And speaking of time travel, people fear changing any detail in history so they don't cause a massive butterfly effect. But at the same time, they don't think about changing one little thing. Now that could have a massive effect on the future. You see, it's not about having an amazing plan to begin with. It's about having the perfect bad plan. And this is how you do it, step by step. Welcome to looks.

So stage one is setting up the bad plan. And the first thing you need to understand about how this works is that first drafts are pretty much always flawed. And it's supposed to be that way. Your job here at the beginning is not to come up with a perfect plan. Just come up with a plan. Think about all the people who've never worked out a minute in their life, but they stress about the best workouts with the maximum gains and the best diet for ultra fast weight loss. That's you now cooking up a grand master plan, even when you don't exactly know how it works.

The things you hope will happen in, let's say, a year from now will probably happen in a different form, on a different timeline. The point is, you shouldn't really stress about that because at the very first stage, your only job is to have one generic, broad and simple basic ass plan. So let's say you want to. Oh, we don't know. Start a YouTube channel and sustain yourself from ad revenue. Solid idea. Your basic plan should be to make X amount of videos in the next X months no matter what. That's it. That's your plan. It doesn't matter how good your content is or how many numbers you generate. That's all stuff for another time.

Now, the second part of this stage one process is risk assessment. You see, for a bad plan to be good, it cannot leave you bankrupt, dead or in jail. That's pretty much it. So you need to set up some limits for yourself, which should never be crossed. And the way you do this is to really think about the worst-case scenarios. For example, investing too much time into this might make you underperform at the current thing you're doing, which may lead to getting fired and now you're homeless. That's a bad, bad plan. If you want to open up a coffee shop and you take out a loan and the coffee shop sucks and you can't pay back your loan and the bank takes your house, that is once again a bad, bad plan. So really go deep into the worst-case scenarios and set up limits. So these worst-case scenarios never happen.

The final part of stage one is to adopt a flexible mindset. You'll probably not hit every mark. You'll probably miss some arbitrary deadlines. The point is to keep at it, not to quit when you've barely even started.

Now stage two is executing the bad plan, so you've got your generic plan, some limits that keep you grounded and open, and a growth mentality. The next stage of the process is to implement something that we call the minimum required action. What is the absolute minimum amount of work that you have to do to sort of get away with that? It's usually something you can do right now without needing anything extra.

For example, let's say your plan is to get into shape eventually. Well, the minimum required action could be going for a 30-minute walk. That's it. You do it once and you're done with it. Now, if you can't pull yourself together and do this one little thing, you need to go into the bathroom, throw some cold water on your face and try again, because this is some pretty basic stuff.

Now, the minimum required action, it's got three purposes. One, it gets you into a place where you actually feel like you're doing it. Secondly, it's the first step in creating a habit on which you'll end up relying on. And lastly, it's also the first step in creating a feedback loop, which we'll be discussing later. So think about the minimum required action. Write it down on a piece of paper if you must, then pick a date and a place where you will do it. It has to be in the next 24 hours to avoid procrastination. This is a low-stakes activity. You don't care about anything besides getting it done, regardless of how long it takes or how well you did.

Congrats violations. You've made your first step, which look, it's by far the hardest. It's a walk in the park from here on out. The next step of stage two is to keep doing the minimum required activity for a minimum of around three months or 20 times. So why this time frame? Well, because it's long enough that you'll eventually get to a point where you don't feel like doing it. But you have to. So you will. This is your first real-world challenge you'll have to overcome. It's also long enough that it starts to feel like a habit and you begin to create a feedback loop.

If you do something for three months, you start to see some patterns and you understand some things better, even for something as simple as going for a walk. You might notice that different times of day will make your walk more or less pleasant, or that your shoes are not really made for walking so much. So you need some better ones. This is called a feedback loop. The more you repeat a process, the more you learn about it naturally. And these learnings will transform the bad plan into a great plan, which is the final stage and the longest and hardest one.

Stage three is evolving from bad to better. If you made it this far, give yourself a pat on the back, my friend. You actually tried to do something which, you know, 99% of people don't bother with. You've already created a process for this. You can tell yourself that you've been doing this for three months and now it's time to take it to the next level. And the way we do this is actually not that complicated. We split this up into three super easy to follow steps. So it's impossible to get this wrong.

Okay. Step one, introduce numbers. Even something as simple as a walk in the park can be analyzed through numbers. You've got the number of steps taken, the number of minutes you took to walk it for anything you kept doing on a general level for three months. You can attach some numbers to it. And these numbers are super important because they'll make the difference between a bad plan and a great plan. So, while you keep doing the minimum required activity, keep track of all the numbers.

Step two, incremental progress. So essentially, this means what low-cost and low-risk thing can you do to improve those numbers for even just a little bit? For example, over a 30-minute walk, if you run for the first minute every time that's incremental progress. You see, this is actually how companies grow constantly. It's not always about multimillion dollar investments or innovations. It's about doing something a little bit better right across the board because, hey, these things really add up. So this is your first real piece of work. Keeping track of numbers and making incremental progress across the board. As a general rule, you should look to make progress either week by week or month by month, depending on what you're doing.

This will be the biggest bulk of work that you do. It will take some time. So the question is, for how long do you keep doing this? Well, that leads us to our final step. Step three, making the switch. You'll know exactly when you're at the final step of stage three when you hit diminishing returns on your incremental progress. Let's say you're now straight up and running for 30 minutes straight. You're not walking anymore. Your stamina is up. You make a great time and you win awards on that app. You track your progress on. But you can't just keep running faster and faster forever. It's done. There is little to no incremental progress left to be made here.

Or let's say you've got that coffee shop up and running and you sell the most coffee possible in a single day at the highest price possible. And there's nowhere to go from here. This is when you know you're at the final step and it's time to make a switch toward a new area that allows for incremental progress once again. Usually, this point comes with a considerable investment in both time and money. But you're a totally different person now. You know what you're doing. You have expertise and a track record.

Your original bad plan is now bulletproof, and where you decide to go from here is totally up to you because you are now an expert at this. And Aluxer, this is how you make a bad plan work. And that's a bonus for you. Let's talk about some common mistakes. So the first one, the most common mistake is trying to do too much at stage one and getting way too overwhelmed. The second most common mistake is to listen to people telling you that you're wasting your time when you're still at stage one. They just don't understand that you are building a habit of feedback loop and the foundation of what's to come.

The third mistake is staying in stage one for far too long. We mentioned around three months or 20 repetitions longer than that, and you're just fooling yourself. We hope you learn something valuable here today. Aluxer, we'll see you back in the next video. Take care.