Dreams are for sleeping and yet, brilliant ideas die because the creative minds who come up with them never seem to go any further than imagining their success. The bitter truth is, a LOT goes into going from dreamer to visionary to success story.

In my little experience working with startups, I have found that while people have the ideas to sell, they usually lack the fortitude to handle the other parts of creating a successful, marketable item.

That's where planning becomes important.

Making a plan is obviously not the end of everything; you're not even guaranteed success, but here are a few ways good planning can get you where you need to be:

• It helps you create realistic goals and timelines for those goals. This is important as we tend to forget that BIG ideas require BIG work and BIG investments. With proper planing you can manage your own expectations and work towards what is realistic and feasible.
• It helps you track progress. Even while you are working on something absolutely spectacular, it is easy to get burnt out and lose motivation because some tasks seem insurmountable. During times like these, looking back over your plan and how many things you have set have been accomplished could give you just enough motivation to move forward.
• It helps you prioritise properly. Working on Goalspaces, there were times I found it hard to wrap my head around what was a priority and what was not and this is true for most endeavours. It becomes very easy to point out what is urgent, important or "good to have" when you make a detailed list of what your basic requirements are in order to consider your dream a reality.
• It gives you reference material for the future. Speaking as a developer, when you join a new team, usually you get "onboarded" on team dynamics, coding practices and current projects being built or maintained by the team. This onboarding process would be so much more tasking if the team did not properly plan out and document its processes. Some of these things may have been done long before you were ever even considered to join the team but they will most likely impact you and people after you.
• It helps you recognise drawbacks, pitfalls and failures, and work on them. As Winston Churchill once said, "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." In the same light, those who fail to properly map out their pathway to success may not be able to see when they fall into the trap of repeating earlier mistakes. The thing you must know is the further along you are in your journey, the higher the stakes. When you make a bad decision, rather than solve and move on, make a record of it so that when you run into such again you know how to avoid the worst case scenario.
• It helps create a roadmap towards achievement. If your mind is in disarray about how to begin and where to start, then the first step in your plan would be to find and find out from, people who have had the opportunity to do what you are trying to and from there, you too can map out what you need to know in order to get there as well.

And at the end of the day, if none of the other reasons convinced you,

• Do it for clout. Plan it out and follow through, the bragging rights will leave you feeling like impostor syndrome should be scared of you.

Let me know what you think and have a wonderful day wherever you are.