The Power of Now

Get off the planning table! Lift off in action now.

You will get the planning perfected as you act on the job.

You do not want to find out you are out of time and all you have in your hands is a perfect plan, except that is all you want.

A perfect plan is nothing without a commensurate action.

Of course you want to be like Abraham Lincoln who would rather use 90 percent of the time to get his axe sharpened out of the total time given him to get the tree cut. Oh that is OK.  But if all you want to do is feel comfortable at your drawing table and get all the design and details perfected, you must have over planned.

Do you know that no matter how perfect your plan appears at the time of planning, you will still have to get some details adjusted during execution?

By emphasizing now, I am not overlooking or underestimating the power of planning, I am only bringing to the fore, the importance of action that is timely.

One of the human problems is the conflict between ‘time’ and ‘timing’.

Through your ingenuity and diligence, you may get the job ready on time, but you might not get it done at the most profitable time, some moment too early or too late.

Sometimes the enemy of productivity is perfection. If you want a job absolutely well done, you might never get anything done.

Often times the best time to start out a new line of production is now. You might come too early for a profitable outing, but having done that , getting another thing done moves you closer to the profitable ‘time of the timing’.

Sometimes it is not the quality that gets the most profit; quantity often times does.

I know, you will go for excellence any day, but is Aristotle not right to say that “excellence is not an act but a habit”, and that “we are what we repeatedly do”?

Alright, I am making a case against myself. But if you choose to do it now and leave the appraisal and criticizing for later, you would have gotten several units done and sometimes you can easily ‘mass correct’ than correct a single perfect model.

So the moral of my ‘ranting’ is get that blueprint off the desk, get off to site.

Turn out that model, it does not matter whether it is now perfect to you or not. This might be your word for today: you have stayed long enough at this junction of indecision, now is the time to get moving in the right direction.

What is now imperfect may still be the definition of perfection even now. It is just one of the jokes ‘time and timing’ plays on us. How can? Think now. Seriously, if you think long enough, you will begin to see beauty in imperfection; and sometimes that is how most things are meant to be.

You have gotten yourself two variables. One only varies as much as you want while the other varies no one knows how; but getting things done now gives you the power of now. This eventually makes the point true that ‘luck comes to the prepared’.

Preparation now, meanwhile, preparation is action; luck later.

To harness the power of now, your motto should be: Action now, perfection later.