The Power of Planning

“If you do the things you ought to do when you ought to do them, you can do the things you want to do when you want to do them.” – Zig Ziglar, author of Top Performance.

In the Harvard graduating class of 1950 the students were asked how many of them had written out their goals for life. Two percent had done so, ninety-eight percent had not. Thirty years later the students were followed up on. The two percent were doing better in the only way the testers could measure, with money, than the other ninety-eight percent combined. It was found that this two percent had not had more advantages than their colleagues, ( i.e. inheritance, high IQ, etc.) Rather, the test found that the reason for their success was because they had planned to be successful, and had written out their goals.

It will be found by a student of history that the mot successful movements for cultural change or advancement in any field have from highly planed movements and organizations. When the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Bradford warned that if they did not plan out their system of how their laws would govern them they would fail, and fail miserably. Hence the Mayflower Compact.
Movements that accomplished anything, from the Protestant Reformation with its many documents to the American Revolution with it Declaration or even the Occupy Wall Street crowd all laid out their goals.

 The late Howard Phillips, founder of the Conservative Caucus, would often state "If you don't know where you are going, any train will get you there." Leaders are those who can plan out courses of action for the future while those ho do not must choose someone else plan to follow.
Men such as Carl Marx and his associate and author of the Communist Manifesto, Fredrich Engles were men who wanted to get somewhere, and so they wrote out their plans and then they acted.
Goals, destinations on a road map, are something not just America but the world need more of. We can have millions of people ready to help with progress, but unless they know what to progress towards they will not get very much done.
When you get into a car the GPS begins by saying "Calculating Route." Only a broken one would say that forever. It is the same with a leader.

Andrew C. Abbott