Get on your marks. Set. Go!
School competitions are the highlight of primary education. You learn the art of adequate preparations. I used to enjoy long-distance running, a 21 km marathon to be specific.
Adequate preparations were the only sure way to winning or earning a decent position. Even folks with talent, always put in a lot in their preparations. One of the runners would do a dry run, just to experience the route a week or so in advance.
Just as it is in sports, preparation is essential at any leadership level or role. Going into any activity without preparation, the chances of winning are very slim. For a football team to win a match, a lot of time is put into preparations for the game. In the business world, this is called the lead indicators. These give the habits of high performance. In a recent interview, one football legend, Christiano Ronaldo, commented on Manchester United’s squad and culture. He emphasized the importance of team preparation and clarity of outcomes even before the game is played.
When journalists ask the majority of the Olympic gold winners how they made it, every athlete talks about the investment they put into preparations. They prepare enough not only to be fit, confident, and agile but to understand the weaknesses of their opponents as well.
As a leader, you must continuously ask yourself who your opponent is. What is their weakness? What makes them unique? What are their focus areas? Why are they thriving? When you ask these kinds of questions, you are giving yourself good mental confidence to confront any kind of challenge. Imagine going into battle only to find you underestimated your enemy! If they overwhelm you with artillery and manpower, you retreat in a disorganized way which risks annihilating your forces and men. That is why in any warfare, the best soldiers invest more time and resources in reconnaissance and footprinting or intelligence to understand their enemy to increase the odds of winning the battle. Preparation is the key to success, the rest are details.
Even when you walk into the football pitch, winning teams think of which games are upcoming, who are the coaches of the teams, what is their style of play, who is their best player, and what is the weak side of the goalkeeper, the left or the right, based on the spot-kicks they have saved or which side has made them concede many goals. You cannot learn all this during the live match.
Malcolm Gladwell in his famous book, Outliers: The Story of Success, noted that one needs at least 10,000 hours of practice in any sport to become an expert. If a young child gets up every day practicing the same technique, they will undoubtedly master it and become an expert. The discipline of consistent preparation makes people outstanding in their chosen discipline. Even a genius who does not prepare will always deliver average work. An average person who prepares delivers excellent work. We can not underestimate the power of preparation. You can not construct a house unless you have identified the land, its topography, and the type of soil. Then get an expert to guide you to come up with a strong foundation. You realize everything is about preparation.
With preparation, you are asking what opportunities are available and how do you tap into them? Opportunities exist, the challenge is, we are never prepared enough to capitalize on them. For any journey, you intend to make, take time to understand what is required. Preparation will help you complete your journey effortlessly.
Copyright Mustapha B Mugisa, Mr. Strategy 2022. All rights reserved
