I bought a sleek European style two-ring notebook that had this very cool lever for opening and closing the binder clips. I filled it with dividers with colored tabs. I hand wrote the little paper labels and slipped them into each colored tab.

I worked on my binder late at night during my first year of practicing law. I kept the binder at home, on the bookshelf my mother had bought me, which stood in the corner of my apartment. I lived in a quadruplex, in a slightly shabby part of Raleigh.

The binder contained my plans for my law firm. I typed the pages on my AT&T 80286 computer and printed them out on my Epson dot matrix printer. This all happened in the summer of 1987. I’d been out of law school for six months.

I kept my plans to myself and worked on this a little at a time as I toiled in the law firm, mostly doing what I was told. I wasn’t sure I was leaving, but I guess I wouldn’t have kept working on my notebook if it wasn’t a strong possibility.

In January of 1990, I became a former law firm associate, in what felt like an out of body experience. I watched myself quit my job. The decision was unplanned–except for the two and half years of planning. I had no idea when I went into work that particular morning that I’d be giving up my steady income. I guess I knew on some level what I wanted, even if I hadn’t decided that I was going to go get it.

You truly can have anything you want

You can have whatever you want if you’re willing to do what’s required. The following plan works for anyone willing to follow it, I promise.

It’s a plan you can use to build your business. But it’s also a plan you can use to build a life. It’ll get you what you want in any endeavor.

Here’s the plan.

1. Decide what you want

You can have pretty much anything you want, if you’ll decide what you want. Many of us aren’t willing to decide. We won’t take the time to think it through. But even when we do sketch out our goals, we hesitate to commit. Why? Because picking one thing means giving up on some others. It’s easier to keep our options open than it is to decide.

All too often, keeping our options open means we get none of our options. We need to decide. We need to pick something and go for it.

Once you decide, then you’ve got to keep that decision (I like to call it a vision) top of mind. You need to think about it every day. It’s your North Star. It should probably be the first page of your notebook.

2. Know why you want it

Volumes have been written on finding your ‘why.’ Why do you want it? Why does it matter to you?

Knowing why you’re doing it drives you forward. It’s also an essential element of bringing others along for the ride. They need to know why they’re helping. They need to understand the mission. If you’re going to expect them to contribute to the cause, they need to know where you’re headed.

You need to know your ‘why’ as well. You’ll have awful days along the way; you’ll have to remind yourself of the reason you’re doing this. You need to be able to remind yourself of why you need to stick to your plan.

3. Create a plan to get it

Your plan won’t work out exactly as you intend. But the exercise of planning will move you in the right direction. My notebook didn’t have every answer, but it helped keep me on track when I had doubts.

A bad plan is dramatically better than no plan. Muddling aimlessly through the day won’t get you where you want to go. Your bad plan will get better and better with each step toward your objective.

4. Be persistent

You know what you want and why you want it. You’ve got a plan for getting it. All that remains is getting up each morning and working on the plan. One day at a time, week after week, month after month, and the next thing you know–you’re where you wanted to go.

There will be dark days. There will be setbacks. The unexpected will happen.

Sadly, we can’t just sprinkle magic pixie dust on our dreams. All we can do is work each day to achieve the objective. We’re going to be spending our days doing something. Why not spend them getting what we want? Why not do the work, stay the course, and reap the reward?

Keep it clear–don’t let it get murky

Unexpected things happen, and it’s easy to lose our way. Babies are born, illness strikes, employees quit, and your dad dies; all these things happened to me, and any one of them can throw us off course. But that’s only if we don’t expect the unexpected.

You can, in fact, plan for unexpected things to happen.

And be forewarned–the unexpected will happen.

[ While I have you here, I wanted to remind you that you can get the latest articles delivered to your inbox a week before they go up on the web. Just one email per week. Sign up here. ]

If you follow the plan, you’ll get what you want. Simply decide what you want, know why you want it, create a plan to get it, and then be persistent.

The plans in that notebook didn’t turn out exactly as I had written them in the summer of 1987. But what resulted was shockingly close to what I saw before I started. The law firm got off the ground, grew, twisted and turned a bit, and was sold in 2017. The plan, while imprecise, was pretty close to the reality that emerged.

I got what I wanted. You can have what you want, too. Just follow the plan.