Turn Your Ideas Into Reality with the Ready, Fire, Aim Method
Do you know how skeet shooters hit their target? A small clay saucer hurtles through the sky, affected by forces of rotation, gravity and the slightest breeze — yet somehow, the shooter makes a clean hit. There are too many unknowns for a human to know exactly where to aim. So what do they do instead? They pull their shotgun up, ready to shoot, then fire. Ready. Fire. Aim.
The same method can be used for achieving your goals, realising your dreams, and turning your ideas into reality. This is what entrepreneur Michael Masterson calls the Ready, Fire, Aim method. It’s been used by entrepreneurs looking to launch a new venture, business leaders searching for ways to innovate their companies — and by ordinary people looking to turn their ideas into remarkable realities.
Ready, Fire, Aim is a tested, practical method for turning your ideas into reality. We’ll explore what it is, and practical advice on how to use it. Ready?
So many ideas are doomed to failure before they even get started. Companies fail, dreams die, ideas wither — and not due to bad luck alone. There are two major reasons for this:
Without proper preparation for turning an idea into reality, any attempt will end poorly. And even with adequate planning, nothing wastes your time more than pursuing a goal that wasn’t worth achieving in the first place.
The purpose of the Ready step is to help you avoid both of these pitfalls. It’s where you discover what it takes to turn your idea into reality, and whether that idea is worth pursuing in the first place. This is the first step to achieving any goal.
Getting ready isn’t about creating a detailed business plan, product roadmap, or mapping out the next 10 years of your life. It’s about making sure that you’re ready to act. You don’t need to know the exact details of how you’ll turn your idea into reality, but you at least need to know where to start. You’ll also need to decide whether your goal is worth pursuing.
It may sound counter-intuitive, but one of the best signs for pursuing a dream is whether other people have achieved something similar. This tells you several things: that it’s worthwhile, that it’s possible, and that you’re guaranteed to not go it alone. If other people make a living selling hand-knitted sweaters on Etsy, there’s a market. If thousands of people — people just like you — run a marathon each year, then that’s a goal within your reach. Learn from those who have come before.
You shouldn’t say yes to every idea. Firstly, because you often won’t know whether you’ll be prepared to follow through. And secondly, because saying yes to a bad idea (or even a good one) means you’ve locked yourself out of saying yes to a great idea in the future.
Below, I’ve provided a modified version of Michael Masterson’s “Ready Checklist”. This is a checklist to work through when assessing an idea, dream, or goal you want to pursue. Do you have an idea you’d like to turn into reality? Answer these questions as soon as possible — the quicker you know, the faster you’ll be able to move ahead with a good idea, or drop a bad one.
The Ready step is about finding answers to these questions. The sooner you find out that your idea isn’t all that great, the sooner you can look for a new one. But if you can answer “yes” to these questions, you’re ready for the next step.
Don’t spend too long getting ready. This step is about getting a feel for the terrain — not for mapping out the territory. Perfect is the enemy of the ready. Do you have a good idea? Do you have a feel for what you’ll need to achieve it? Once you do, it’s time to fire.
Nothing was ever achieved without action. Yet often we get paralysed by planning and perfection, and fail to move towards our goals. With a thousand possible actions, we choose none.
This where the the Fire step comes in. This is the time where you decide on the smallest meaningful action to take, then take action.
Don’t wait for today to be perfect. It never will be. The point of this step is to take action as soon as possible. What is the smallest, easiest thing you can do to make an impact towards your goal? Do that.
Isaac Newton’s first law of motion states that a body at rest will remain at rest unless acted on by an outside force. This is the law of inertia — unless you take action, nothing with change.
Imagine a rocket on a launchpad, bound for outer space. The most difficult part of the rocket’s journey isn’t the trip from high Earth orbit to Mars — it’s just getting off the ground. Thousands of tonnes of rocket fuel are burnt and a massive amount of energy is spent in an effort to lift the metal behemoth the first few metres off the ground. But once it’s there, that rocket has inertia on its side. Launching a rocket is hard, but it’s just as hard to stop once it gets going.
Your ideas are like that rocket. Before you can go from the launchpad to Mars, you need to take the crucial step of getting your ideas off the ground. You need to overcome inertia. Anyone can dream of flying, but at some point they need to take the leap. Don’t get stuck on the launchpad. Don’t wait for perfection. Get ready, then fire.
As Chris Guillebeau writes, “inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better.” Coming up with a great idea is the inspiration. But for it to matter, you must act. There are two things you need to do to accomplish this step.
That’s it. No worrying about a perfect plan. No worrying about things you can’t possibly control. Just start moving in the right direction. Overcoming inertia is the hardest part of getting started. In the Ready step, you determined the basic tasks you needed to get done. This is where you do them.
It’s worth noting that Ready, Fire, Aim does not mean acting with reckless abandon. It doesn’t mean diving into action without preparation. “It’s Ready, Fire, Aim, not Fire at Will”, writes Masterson. Make sure you’re aiming in the right direction. Don’t plan your next 5 years, but at least plan your next 5 actions.
The path to turn your ideas into reality looks quite different once you’re travelling it. There are certain things you cannot know before you take it. And there are many things you’ll learn once you’re there. By learning from your actions, you can adjust your aim.
This is where the final step of the Ready, Fire, Aim comes in. In the Aim step, you get feedback from your actions, and make adjustments based on this feedback. Here’s where you make changes based on real-world information, and continually adjust your trajectory to head in the right direction.
Once you’ve taken action, reflect on the outcomes. Did certain things work better than expected? Did others not work as well? What new information do you have? When you first took action, you only had a small amount of information to decide on the best course to take. That was all you needed to get started. But now that you are making progress, you can learn from your actions, adjust your aim, and continue to grow.
Why is adjusting your aim important? Consider the 1-in-60 rule. Used in air navigation, the 1-in-60 rule states that for each degree you travel off course, you’ll miss your target by 1 mile for every 60 miles you fly. This may seem insignificant, but on a flight from New York to Los Angeles, a single degree of error will send your plane 40 miles off target. The same is true for your trajectory. Small errors at the start of your journey compound to large errors by its end. Your estimates will never be perfect, so it is crucial to correct your course where you can.
After travelling your path for some time, you’ll realise why we didn’t earlier aim for perfect — the future has too many unknowns. How much more do you now know than you knew 5 years ago? Some lessons are only learnt from experience. Yet with this experience, you can make better choices going forward. Never perfect, but always better.
The Ready, Fire, Aim method isn’t a linear process. It’s a tool you can use first to get started turning your ideas into reality, and then second to build systems to improve and adjust your course. This is what the process looks like in practice:
Once you reach the Aim step, your work doesn’t end. In fact, it’s only the beginning of a process of continual learning, improvement and growth. Here’s how to build a feedback loop for turning your ideas into reality.
Learn, adjust, repeat. This is the final step of Ready, Fire, Aim.
Ideas are easy — taking action is what matters. If you have some dream to pursue, or an idea to turn into reality, don’t get paralysed by planning and perfection. The Ready, Fire, Aim method provides the framework for choosing the right ideas, taking action, and continually improving.
The sooner you start, the sooner you can turn your ideas into reality. The choice is yours, if you’re willing to choose.
Turn Your Ideas Into Reality with the Ready, Fire, Aim Method
Research & References of Turn Your Ideas Into Reality with the Ready, Fire, Aim Method|A&C Accounting And Tax Services
Source
0 Comments