Planning fully

Another quote from @Flipbooks, this time a Chinese proverb:

He who deliberates fully before taking a step will spend his entire life on one leg

We all know the benefits of planning before doing.  However, there are times that planning becomes procrastination.  You can never know every possibility, so there is a time that you have to look up from the plans and do it.

Besides:

No plan survives contact with the enemy

Courtesy of Helmuth von Moltke the Elder (yes I can use non-Twittered quotes).

Neither of these quotes should be taken to mean that planning is useless.  Note that the first quote warns against full deliberation, not against deliberation in its entirety.  Likewise, looking at von Moltke’s biography, you can see that he did plan as fully as possible.

Instead, they should be taken as advice to plan as much as needed, and no more.  Once you start planning for the possibility of your main players being abducted by aliens, you have left the realm of reasonable planning and entered the realm of planning as procrastination.

There are much better ways to procrastinate.

Oops, found another related one:

Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence

Vince Lombardi, via @Flipbooks.