Good people are doing their jobs and running their businesses to the best of their abilities. There are many different types of businesses and business people, large corporations, entrepreneurs, small business owners and obviously self-employed Internet Marketers.  Many of them have a simple trait that (whilst not a flaw) which is somewhat bemusing.

I don’t say this to criticise, but many of us it seems react to our experiences, this is true in our lives as well as our businesses. You may think of course we react, if something happens in life or business you deal with it, you react. But what I actually mean by this statement, is that we react to what has happened or occurred. We wait for something to happen and then deal with it.

Many times, in businesses large or small businesses are planning out projects and working towards deliverables, and for that project, you will find things like milestones, so you can measure where you are at (in Internet Marketing terms, these would be your leads and product saturation statistics for example: are my marketing campaigns reaching the numbers and areas I want them to?) That is something you want to track. Also, in many corporate projects you will find a document called a “risk register”, these are documents listing all things that have occurred that have caused a ‘risk’ to the project. They get entered into the register, so you can explain why things have slipped or not been completed when you expected them to be.

Great. But if you turn look at it more closely, you will often find that everything on these registers are things that you already knew up front! You could have planned in the beginning how to avoid them instead, thereby not risking your project or campaign, simply by not reacting to obstacles as they occur, but by proactively going looking for those obstacles and solutions before you get to that point. Pre-empting the negative, if you will.

So many times, in businesses large and small,  initiatives fail not because of bad products but because of a lack of planning. It almost seems like we are engrained to try and approach things in the lazy way, i.e. wait for it to happen then deal with it.

The Richard Branson’s and Elon Musk’s of this world turn that concept on its head and rather than just react to obstacles and situations, getting bogged down and delayed, you will find that they have already been proactively looking for and at those issues and already have people and possible solutions in place. Don’t wait till it happens to plan a response, train your mind to see the different sides of the equations. Train your mind to look for problems and solutions before they cause you to stumble.

In short stop just reacting, and start reacting proactively.