Charlie Gilkey

Charlie Gilkey helps people go from idea to done, with an emphasis on turning ideas into doable projects that get on your schedule.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Charlie’s success

Regular planning and recalibration of planning

Result if you follow the steps in Charlie’s session

Get the strategy to go from overwhelm to doable

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

Before you commit to the plan, you really have to check in and make sure that it’s something you fundamentally want to do. Because if you don’t want to do it, one of two things are going to happen.

It’s going to get beat by something you actually want to do or you’re gonna have to really work your discipline muscles to get it done. It’s not going to be like something else, which you can do easily.

I think where people will start thinking it’s a straight jacket, is when they don’t embrace the sort of Whiteboard thinking that we’ve talked about earlier. They’re like, I made the plan, and it should go according to plan.

No, no. The plan was to get you and keep you moving. The second the plan keeps you from moving forward, you got a bad plan, and you got to update it, right?

And so that’s the first thing that I would want to say when your plan no longer reflects reality, don’t try to make a reality match your plan. It never works, right? Update your plan. Give yourself a do over.

The second thing that I want to say about this, the better you do with your project, the more you invite other people in to help you, the more you tap into the collective brilliance around you, the faster your plan is going to be obsolete.

And here’s why; when you start any project, when you start any goal, you see the world a certain way. And we’re all blinded by a particular way that we see the world. Now, that world, that way in which we see the world is always smaller than a total set of possibilities actually available to us, the world is way bigger than we can imagine.

Well, when you start adding people onto the project. When you start making progress, you start shipping pieces of it, all of a sudden, the world gets a lot bigger very quickly.

The most rational thing to do in that scenario is to address the goal and the plan in the context of this larger world of possibilities you’ve created for yourself, rather than sticking to the smaller world that you started with.

And I say that because, Liam, you probably have experienced plenty of entrepreneurs and plenty of changemakers that start and I think the world is like this small thing, and then they get paralyzed because the way they started does not reflect the total set of possibilities that they can create in the world. That’s the point of taking action actually, is to create new possibilities, not just to seize on the ones that you can see when you started.

And I think that’s one way people can or another reason people can feel like you’re playing as a straitjacket is that when they look at the plan, and they look at what’s available in front of them, there’s a mismatch. And in that case, they have to choose between this plan that they spent time making and this new world that they find themselves living in. Always go with the world you find yourself living in, always go with that.

And the other thing about plans, the reason they get forgotten is because we make the plan and then it sort of disappears in a hard drive or a random notebook or something like they live all over the place. Like if it’s a really important plan, print it out. Put it up in your office, put it on your desk, right? You know, you can have a paperweight.

I’ve got one here where like you can stick it in there and put it in front of your computer. So you walk back to it and the first thing you see is this plan that you created for yourself.

And again, it’s not about the plan being perfect. It’s about the fact that you have done this work before and you have a default plans. Make brilliant, brilliant defaults for you, so that you don’t wake up in the morning and wonder what am I going to do for today? What was I supposed to do? Look at what you’ve already done.

If they’re really big goals or really things that matter to you, I’ve learned this from my good friend Pam Slim when she’s writing a book, I always, she always takes the table of contents and she puts it in her bathrooms and in multiple bathrooms and she just takes it to the mirror because she sees that a lot, right? And it just is another way of reminding her.

So you know, put it in your bathroom, put it on your kitchen or put it on your kitchen fridge, put it on your desk and make sure that it doesn’t go into some you know paper black hole or some digital black hole never to be seen again.