I can remember when I was in school growing up thinking asking myself questions like “what am I being prepared for?” and “how long must I prepare, when do I get to go and do?”

Well, I’m pretty convinced the answer is now.  Right out of college I was in a learning phase, followed by an execution phase where we were making improvements rapidly in every aspect of the business.  Then, I moved into a leadership role.  The early years of leadership have been spent learning to lead, building processes, building the team and other foundational things.

I am now tired of just preparing and ready to see this team execute!    Time to go sell.  Time to develop and launch new products.  Time to build orders to customer’s demands.  Time to build new innovative manufacturing tools.  It is time to go grow!

Everything naturally goes through phases of planning, followed by execution, followed by analysis which leads to more planning and so on.  Logically we understand that the vast majority of our time should be spent on execution.  Spent on actually achieving something.  However, I think for a host of reasons we tend to over prepare or over analyze.

We tend toward over-preparation because we procrastinate.  If we are scared of failure, not starting and continually preparing means we never actually have to test ourselves.  After all, if practice makes perfect, then we must continue to practice until we achieve perfection, then we can go about execution.  It is thinking like this that traps us in practice and preparation mode.

Or we tend towards trying something quickly or on a trial basis then over-analyze.  Many of the same worries and fears that may make us reluctant to start, force us to overthink the result.  If the result did not exactly match our goals, then we fall into that same perfection seeking mode, looking for more data or more reasoning behind the result.

We must break this cycle and get to work!  Granted, its not that preparation itself is not hard work, execution just brings the result, so I think its time to make it happen!  Execute & Bring the Results!