Do You Have a Plan?

Hey team. All right, so here we are. This is Wednesday Workshop. It’s April, and we’re so excited to be here.

I read this quote by Zig Ziggler. I don’t know how many of you guys have ever read any books by him. He was an amazing guy. I read his last book that he wrote before he passed, and it was amazing. To be in your 80s and still writing books and sending messages to the future, to future leaders and people, is amazing.

But this particular quote he’s talking about, he says, “You need a plan to build a house. To build a life, it’s even more important to have a plan or a goal.” That got me to thinking.

If you wanted to build a house, there’s a big, long process. One of the first things you need to do for whatever land that you’re going to build it on, you have to literally submit building plans. And it’s a long, lengthy process. And in the city of Portland, to be honest with you, it’s even longer. I know people that have taken a year or two. We worked with a client one time. It took them over two years with building plans and stuff after they bought property. And it’s cost them more than a million plus dollars just to get through the building plan phase of building this building that they were building. And how many times could I say building and building and building?

Anyway, my point is this. You go through a lengthy process and you have a plan before you even purchase the lumber to build the house.

And so in your life, how much more important is it to write down a plan, to write out and think through and write down goals and contingencies and things that you want to do, and counting the cost of what you want to accomplish? I think so many of us. And I’m speaking not to the choir, I’m speaking to all of us, including myself.

I don’t want this to sound preachy because I have made this mistake of going through periods of my life. Maybe even more than a decade or more of my life in times past aimlessly because I didn’t have a plan or a goal. I didn’t write things down, and I didn’t plot things out, and I didn’t do things. I just kind of went with the flow.

And then along the way, we get upset, we get angry, sometimes frustrated. We might even cry; we might get really mad or angry at the fact that we have not yet arrived at what we’re trying to do. We haven’t made it yet. The reason for that is we don’t know where we really want to go, and we haven’t plotted a course to get there.

So you first must have a destination, and then you must know the route and the plan along the way in order to accomplish those things. And so Zig’s quote really kind of got me thinking. What is your plan? What are your goals? Have you written them down? Have you plotted it out?

What are you doing today to better yourself, to get you to where you’re going? Because you’re not going to just arrive there. You’re not going to get to that moment of success or betterment. And if you do have some sort of a goal or an idea and you accomplish one of those things, how are you going to keep it? How are you going to maintain it? How are you going to keep going with it?

Some people have this goal of like, hey, I want to buy a house. That’s great, that’s a great goal. How are you going to achieve that? And then after you get it, if you get it, right when you get it, what do you need to do to make sure you maintain it?

How often do you need to change out the roof? How do you budget for that? Every year because we live in the Northwest. Every April, May, you’re going to have to pressure wash all the sidewalks because they’re going to be green covered with moss. How do I know? I have a lot of concrete around my house I have to pressure wash. As a matter of fact, I got to write down a plan of how I’m going to get that done here before the summer happens. I’m going have to spend a day or two pressure washing all the concrete around my house. So I have to plan that out. I have to make that happen.

So just like you need a building plan, you need a life plan. What are your life plans? Are you budgeting? Do you have life insurance? Do you have money going into a 401k or an IRA or a Roth or something like that? Are you planning for retirement?

Because you’re going to get older, trust me, I know, every morning we wake up one more close, one day closer to death, one more day closer. Because just like birth is issued to every single soul, so is death. It’s just a matter of how much life do we have between birth and death.

How much time do you spend? How much time do you spend? I’m not trying to be morbid or anything. It’s death is like my pastor says, this death is issued to one per person. It’s guaranteed; we’re all going to at some point expire. So what are you doing to plan towards that and how much fun are you going to have and how much enjoyment are you going to have along the way?

What are you doing to make your life more fun, more enjoyable, and make a mark in the families and lives and people that you work with and that you live with and the family that you are building maybe between you and your wife, your spouse, your significant other, your husband?

What kinds of things are you doing to build that and plan that out? Because they’re important things, and life happens so fast, you can spin around on a dime, and the next thing you know, it’s been a decade.

What have you accomplished in that decade, and are you any closer to that thing on this beautiful, beautiful day? God bless you, have a wonderful week, remember to be valuable because nothing less would do, and if you haven’t got all the things planned out, take a step today, start writing them down. Take a step tomorrow, gain a little more clarity, take a step the next day, and accomplish one of those or make benchmark, rock-type goals to accomplish to get closer and closer to the next thing.

And what you’re doing along the way, if it’s finance-related, remember Smart Dollar, we signed you up for Smart Dollar, we gave you that avenue, use it so that you can gain closer to your goals and set a plan for your future. And again, God bless you guys, have a wonderful rest of your week, I’ll see you next week.