Why you have to have a plan, even if it doesn’t get you where you want to go.

Plans have the purpose of pointing us in a direction, but they don’t show us every pothole on the way.

Sergej Brin and Larry Page had one big goal when they founded Google: to collect the knowledge of the world and to relate it to each other.

What they definitely didn’t have was a perfect plan that included the advertising business, Gmail, Google docs, Streetview, and finally Google X.

Looking back today on the development of perhaps the most influential company in the world, we think that there must have been a prominent and smart plan that culminated in what we now know as Alphabet inc.

But the master plan did not exist. All Page and Brin had was the vision of collecting knowledge, systematizing it, and making it accessible to all people.

Their first real plan was to start with the information available on the Internet. Unlike many think, the search engine was never the declared ultimate goal of the two founders, but only a first step towards their grand vision.

And even this first plan — let’s build a search engine for the Internet — did not contain all the intermediate steps necessary to its realization.

But the plan set the direction. Everything else would be found along the way.

The development of a plan is like drawing more accurate maps increasingly

When we look at nautical charts from the time of Columbus today, they have little in common with those in use today. They represent reality only very sketchy.

In the next centuries, however, the maps became more and more accurate, because more and more explorers and merchants explored the oceans and added more and more details to the plans.

Transferred to Page and Brin, we can imagine that the two of them have also entered unknown waters. Nobody before them had tried not only to capture the entire Internet automatically but also to sort the search results according to relevance.

All they could do was get going. Everything they learned on their way through mistakes and new insights, they integrated into their plan and modified it with it.

How money could be earned with it, the two did not know at the beginning yet. The idea of placing suitable advertisements next to the results of the search queries and automatically concealing these advertising spaces came later.

Then came the money, and the possibilities grew. At some point, they could target projects as crazy as Streetview. But in the beginning, they didn’t have enough information for a real master plan.

Couldn’t they have set this up in a master plan from the start? No, they wouldn’t have, because many of the technical possibilities that Alphabet’s current projects require simply didn’t exist back then.

As little Columbus could make a plan for the colonization of the New World before his supposed trip to India, as little could Brin and Page foresee what concrete steps they would have to take later to realize their original vision.

Neither Columbus nor Page and Brin had the necessary information to draw up a complete plan for what they would achieve later.

What does that mean for you?

Many projects are never started, and many visions never realized because we tend to get stuck in the planning phase forever.

For example, I know people who have wanted to write a book for years but never start because they can’t see the whole story yet. I had this problem at the very beginning of my writing career, but then I threw my fears overboard and just started writing the book.

When I started, the whole story gradually revealed itself to me. In the end, I had a book that I could never have imagined before in its complexity.

Today I publish a new novel every two months because I only make very rough plans for the plot in advance and develop the rest as soon as I know more about the story through writing.

Do you also have a big vision without knowing how to realize it ultimately? Then take the first step today. Make a primitive plan for the first steps and then take those steps. You can only win.

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