Strategy: Stick to it, and you can achieve any goal

Having a strategy prevents you from getting distracted, and keeps you on your path to success when you encounter headwinds on the road to your goals

I recently met up for lunch with an old friend.

He wants to leave the corporate world and wonders how I did it. We spoke about the various mindset shifts from employee to entrepreneur, and he asked me a single probing question that made me think for a bit.

“If being an employee and an entrepreneur were really that different, how did you make the transition that quickly”, he asked referring to how I left my corporate law job of 20 years, fully replacing my pay within months of starting up.

For one, I took a course on entrepreneurship that they provide a lot of mindset training, helping us to understand the difference between life as an employee and life as an entrepreneur. And knowing what to expect is half the battle won.

I was sure there was more than that. In fact, what I’m about to share is a case of me benefitting from giving back.

Realizing The Importance Of Strategy

I now work with many students on a weekly basis to provide coaching and mentorship to help them leave their corporate jobs.

The ones who make the transition most smoothly and quickly all have a strategy. The same way I had a strategy, which I share freely with them using the same spreadsheets that I used to plan my corporate exit.

Former World Chess Champion, Garry Kasparov said it best – if you don’t commit to a strategy, you are doomed to react to your opponents, giving them control of your game!

Components of your strategy

Breaking this quote down, the first thing you need to identify is the purpose of you playing the game. For the purpose of this article, it would be leaving your corporate job behind.

Knowing that goal, you would develop a strategy to leave it, and keeping to that strategy will keep you on course to your goal.

An example of such a strategy could be to decide that you are going to learn a new skill, fix a budget for a time frame to break even or replace a portion of your income at which time you will leave your corporate job. An integral part of that strategy is how much of your budget you will need to spend to reach your goal, be it in training, startup or marketing costs.

Your end goal could be to more than replace your income, rather than to just replace a portion of it, but each goal needs to be achievable at that point in time. Once you’re there, you’re playing a different game anyway.

How your strategy keeps you on track

Now back to spending your budget to hit your goals.

One of the most common head winds that hit people coming out of corporate jobs is that former corporate folk like us, are afraid to spend our budgets. Remember that your strategy requires you to spend on training or marketing to get to your goals. But cash conservation mode kicks in, and unless you have your strategy in mind, you’re going to stop spending. And if you do that, you’ll never get to your goals.

If you really want anything in life, be it to lose weight or leave your corporate job, work on a strategy and then keep to it.