Strategic Planning to Create Wealth

People who succeed don’t just get there by luck or magic. Strategic planning is necessary if you want to achieve something big. It doesn’t take great intelligence or things an ordinary person doesn’t already possess to create wealth. It take belief, strong desire, persistence, and a well thought out plan. Here’s how to utilize strategic planning to create wealth.

Start at the End

You have to know exactly where you want to be in order to get there. Wishing really really hard to be rich isn’t going to make it happen (no matter what Law of Attraction buffs profess.) But having a really good plan might.

I say “start at the end”, because you can’t plan from the bottom up. It’s nearly impossible. You need to have something concrete to focus on, a definite place to get to. You need the big picture.

Decide, in detail, exactly how you want the end result of your efforts to look like. Visualize how you want to be living , what you want to be doing. For now, don’t include how exactly you’ll get there,, because you won’t be sure of that until after the Research phase of your strategic planning. Unless, of course, the getting there is an integral part of the end result (such as you want to create your fortune through writing novels, or creating masterpiece oil paintings.) But if wealth is your main goal, then you will want to leave yourself open to all possibilities.

Using Visualization to Manifest Your Destiny

While earlier I let you know I don’t believe in the Law of Attraction, at least in the sense of gaining what you want through the Cosmos, or the Universal Consciousness, I still think that the process of Visualization, and strong desire, are necessary in reaching your goals.

Visualization is basically daydreaming with a purpose. Creating a vivid picture in your head is important to cement the idea into your subconscious. Your subconscious mind will work to get you where you want to be, by noticing opportunities, and coming up with new ideas by taking in subtle clues you might have missed consciously, and forming them into useful ideas. This is invention and genius at work.

Research

Since your goal is to create wealth and money, you need to use the next phase of strategic planning, Research, to research different ways to create wealth, learn how the economy works, and the laws of money and wealth creation.

How long does this process take? The answer is, As Long As It Takes. It all depend on how much you already know, how fast you learn, and how much time you have to educate yourself. You need a perfectly clear idea of how money works, and the basics of creating wealth, but you should just aim for a general overview of the different ways to create it.

You can take more time to learn specific things, such as how the stock market works, or real estate, later when you’ve decided on a plan.

Weighing Your Options

Once you’ve learned the basics for wealth creation, it’s time to weigh your options. This is where you look at all the options available to you, and figure out which ones fit you best. This is the stage where your ideas are beginning to form, and you’re brainstorming and weighing how different forms of building wealth might be put into a useful plan.

Building a Road Map

This is where you make your plan. You now know where you want to be, and have a general idea of the possible ways to get there.

This is where the real strategy comes into play. You have the necessary, basic ingredients to build a plan: your end goal, possible ways to get there, and the resources you have to start with. Now you just need to connect where you are right now to where you want to be in a well-detailed plan.

Take a look at all of the resources you have at hand right now. How can you reach your goal, starting from where you are right now?

How do you complete a maze? Most people start from the beginning and pencil in a route to the end, usually taking several tries, with a lot of backtracking. Then there are those who figure out the trick: start at the end, and head towards the beginning. There’s usually one, pretty easy to find path.

Life is similar to a maze: there are generally only a few routes from one point to another, and the easiest and best ones are found by starting at the end.

A part of your plan should be noting and providing for defense against likely or predictable obstacles. You WILL have obstacles, so you may as well try to provide for the inevitability. You should make looking for and avoiding possible obstacles a part of your overall plan. This could involve anything from planning to buy different types of insurance, to creating a business plan in a way that reduces liability, and potential monetary losses.

Preparing for obstacles should also include Plan B’s for as many parts of your plan as possible. If the real estate market goes down, or your market for sunglasses dries up, you want to be sure you can keep moving forward on your road to wealth.

You don’t want all of your eggs in one basket, and you want plans for ditching lost causes in a way the reduces loss as much as possible.

Taking Action

Taking action is the catalyst to getting your plan going. If you’ve planned well enough, there will be obvious actions to take immediately. The first step in your plan could be anything. Signing up for a class, starting a savings account to build up capital, buying a book on stock trading.

The execution of your plan is the beginning of your success.