“No plan survives contact with the enemy.” — Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke
I have had the idea of disciplining my scattered notes and clippings about strategy and the extant patterns in the world for many years. In my mind's eye it was always an orderly and coherent vision. As long as I left it as an idea, it was free to stay that way — clean and shiny.
But the notes and scraps never went very far. So, I thought, "I'll create a blog" — a place where I can organize my thoughts and the ideas of others that I find interesting. Perhaps I will learn more from the comments left by others with similar interests. At minimum, the possibility that someone else might see my notes should motivate me to aspire to a certain level of rigour to discipline my ramblings.
Of course, the moment I began to type it became obvious that it would take a lot more work for me to do anything like what I imagined.
So, I will try to accept that this will be a slower process than I had thought. And I will "de-scope" — I will rein in my ambitions.
Which brings me to one of the more useful life strategies I have found: "Chunk it!" — break a project down into tasks and then break the tasks down into smaller bits, and just keep going until I finally have some small thing that I can actually do right now.
So my plan has already evolved from creating profound essays that might change the world to something more like, "Hey, look at this shiny rock I found!"
Moltke was a Prussian general. For the rest of us not trying to conquer Europe, his quote might be better paraphrased as:
"No plan survives contact with reality." And that process has just begun.