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Nothing stopping you achieving your personal goals. You absolutely would have been a better person by now, except so much has happened in the past few years... honestly, no one could really expect you to achieve anything when things in the wider world just kept happening.
Pro tip: 2029 won't be any different for you, for your company, for the country, than 2024. Five-year plans don't work; over 300 years of government by carefully pre-selected elected representatives who have always best represented their own interests should have taught us that particular lesson by now.
Wherever you are in 2029, it's mostly going to be by accident, rather than design. After all, how many people confidently asking ChatGPT to draft their new 5 Year Plans laugh the loudest at the idea of a long-range weather forecast?
The problem is, five years is too long to guarantee global, national, and socio-economic circumstances with any more certainty than sticking a pin in a list of options. It's also too short to actually effect significant change. Many of you reading this will be very familiar with having spent three years working to implement a new IT system, or bring about 'company culture change' that your management and leadership swore up and down could be achieved comfortably inside a year. It would be six months of hard graft, then three months of light-touch implementation support, then it could run itself, and you'd just need to be in the background in case anyone had any questions. Or something went wrong. But it wouldn't go wrong - everyone wanted this change, the best people were on it. It was inevitable.
Time behaves very differently when we focus on definitive points within it.
You, your company, your family, your team, are going to find yourself, in 2029, roughly where you are now. Older, more jaded, and further into burnout.
That's where The Productive Pessimist comes in. We can help you avoid the bleak future of another five year plan failing. Let's face it, whatever the change was, if you really wanted it, you'd've done it by now. Your Five Forces analysis is never honest. Your market research has terrible myopia. Your PEST and PESTLE of a STEEPLE Analysis only covered the threats you felt comfortable talking down.
You don't know what you don't know.
Instead of five year plans, or even five month plans, The Productive Pessimist brings everything down to a very simple exercise in personal responsibility.
The Productive Pessimist Plan:
Whether you're one person, a team of 20, or a company of 2,000, our Productive Pessimist Plan is the same. We work in fives, too - because, despite its impracticality, people seem to like five as a number - but they're fives that you can control.
1. Identify five things you failed at last year
2. Choose one of those things you want to turn into a success.
3. Write down five actions you can take in the next week - one per day for five days.
4. Identify one thing which could derail each of the actions you identified in step 3.
5. Write down the top five worst impacts if every action you've identified fails.
That's all you have to do to get started. Once you've done that - book a consultation with The Productive Pessimist, and we'll help you water the seeds you've planted in those first five steps, give you the right plant food formulae, and walk alongside you on a path to success, which will, in time, bloom with the achievements you laid down without us.
Email theproductivepessimist@yahoo.com to do more with five days' work than you've achieved with however many five year plans.
With our support, there's no reason that, by 2029, you shouldn't have achieved 2,029 successes - that's not even two things a day for each day between now, and this time in 2029.
How many successes are you crossing your fingers for in your five year plan?
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