Back in July, I shared a post and a video based upon the simple phrase “I Ask, Then I Act.”
To be honest, this is not a revolutionary insight. A lot of people have described the things that do or do not happen before you take action.
- There’s Nike’s famous “Just Do It.” This wasn’t necessarily intended to imply that you proceed in a thoughtless manner. Nike was instead addressing the tendency to hesitate, and urging people to move forward.
- Now there are phrases that DO imply (at least in my humble opinion) that you proceed in a thoughtless manner, the two most famous of which are “ready, fire, aim” and “move fast and break things.” Both of these, especially the latter, suggest that the act of doing is itself empowering and that the negative consequences of doing something bad can be mitigated by doing the right thing later.
But on Wednesday I ran into another phrase that urges that you do something BEFORE you act, but it uses a different formulation than my two-step process.
I attended the Small Business Expo in Pasadena on Wednesday, at which the first keynote was delivered by Dave Charest of Constant Contact. He let us know at the beginning of his keynote that he was going to repeat the following throughout:
“Review. Plan. Execute.”
Unlike me, Charest got a little more granular about what happens when you execute / act. In a LinkedIn post from a couple of weeks ago, Charest talked about each of the three parts of RPE. Yeah, he has an acronym. Because AARC.[1]
✅ Review: Where are you right now?
You don’t need to be an expert. Just be honest about what’s working and what’s not.
✅ Plan: What’s the one thing you can do to support your goal?
Not ten things. One. Focus is how you win.
✅ Execute: Block time on your calendar to actually do the work.
If you don’t protect that time, distractions will take it from you.
Charest’s “review” step maps to my “ask” step, but I didn’t explicitly call out the “plan” step like Charest did. But I have talked about “focus” a lot, which is the emphasis of Charest’s “plan” step. Don’t go all over the place. Just do one thing. He parallels Wally Schirra’s thoughts on this issue.
“With my eyes fixed on the control panel, studiously ignoring the view, I began a slow, four degrees per second, cartwheel.”
When Schirra went into space as part of the Project Mercury program, he was focused on the goal of completing his engineering tasks. While the view from space was spectacular, he ignored it and focused on the control panel. And the engineering tasks were themselves focused, explicitly avoiding “Larry Lightbulb” experiments. This was a reaction to the prior Scott Carpenter mission.
But whether you review and plan, or if you just act, I believe you need to prepare before you do the thing.
[1] AARC: Acronyms are really cool.
Bredemarket 
1 Comment