#96🚀 Plan B will distract you from Plan A
SuperPowers for Electrical Engineers 🦸🏻♂️🦸🏼♀️
👋 Hello, friends! Dr. Molina here 👨🔧
The best way to evolve professionally is by saying no to everything that is not part of the main goal, aka Plan A, and the main enemy of Plan A is Plan B.
Today, I'm going to delve into this topic, and I'd love to hear about your experiences in managing your mental resources.
In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable. - Dwight D. Eisenhower
Plan B will distract you from Plan A
When I try to decide how to spend my time, I always try to think about what my main goal is, that is, what my Plan A is.
Your Plan A could be becoming an actor (like Harrison Ford's case), starting a company, becoming a professional athlete, getting a promotion, or working at Netflix.
And Plan B, or C, or everything else, is the backup option in case the first one doesn't work or simply the option you already have at hand.
Saying NO to spending time on anything other than Plan A is also an investment of mental time in Plan A. Life is full of choices where you can allocate your time, and I'm not referring to time in its most explicit definition, but mental time.
When I go to play tennis for 90 minutes, I am focused on winning points. But when those 90 minutes are over, I am mentally back on Plan A.
If, on the other hand, I had decided to create a YouTube channel about tennis, I wouldn't just be dedicating time to making videos; I would also be mentally generating ideas and evaluating the success of the videos, which would have an emotional impact on me.
When you meditate, you learn to see your thoughts from a different perspective, as if they weren't yours. This allows you to identify which thoughts try to trap you more often. Usually, completely irrational thoughts can be more frustrating than actual reality.
When you look into someone's eyes, remember that you don't know the internal battles they are silently carrying.
So, meditating helps a lot in identifying the type of thoughts that occupy our mental time.
Once you are clear about what your Plan A is... Wait a moment, are you wondering what your Plan A is?
If the answer is not obvious and immediate, it means you don't have a Plan A; you have several Plan Bs or even Cs. If that's the case, I invite you to block out about 10 hours in your schedule over the next 2 weeks, with slots of at least 2 hours.
It needs to be long enough for you to get bored, to feel like you're not making progress. Write down and draw what your Plan A is. It's a process of squeezing your brain, so it won't be super enjoyable. If you don't want to or don't currently have a Plan A in your life, that's perfectly fine too.
Going back to the previous point, if you already have a Plan A, try to visualize all the moments that truly make your Plan A the most exciting thing in your professional life right now. Okay, save those thoughts for the days when you want to give up on Plan A (there will be many), and now visualize the main challenges you think you'll encounter along the way. Do they have a solution? Then it's not a challenge. If they don't have a solution, great, you have work to do.
Now that you have a better perspective on Plan A, it's time to get to work on it. It's time to ask yourself, what is the order of priorities? Clearly, identify the bottlenecks, those things that are preventing other things from happening. Sometimes, they may seem like tasks to be done slowly, and other times, you need to sit down and tackle them head-on, but definitely identify the bottlenecks and put them at the top of the list.
In reality, Plan A doesn't have to have a fixed ending or the same ending always. Think of Pep Guardiola; being the best coach and winning titles is a way of life for him, even though he doesn't always win.
Balancing Plans A and Z
Harrison Ford wanted to be an actor, but the risk of running out of money was too high, so to free up more time for Plan A, he became a carpenter (Plan Z). It provided him with some income, but of course, it didn't appeal to him as a long-term way of life. However, it bought him more opportunities in the form of time to land the right role. Being a carpenter didn't take away a single minute of his mental focus from Plan A.
Combined Learning
And now you might be wondering, "If Plan A is to be a tennis player, can I only focus on tennis?" Of course not. Steve Jobs attended few classes, but one of them was typography, and he pioneered the use of beautiful fonts on computers. Soccer coaches read Harvard Business Review cases on startups to find ideas for their teams, and top executives read biographies of NBA coaches to learn how to motivate their teams. Plan A is always on their minds.
I like poetry, sports, and painting. I seek inspiration in bars and centuries-old trees, in small companies, and in my brother.
But Plan A is always present.
Thank you for reading!
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