I’ve followed a lot of plans in my time.

• The funnel plan.
• The content calendar plan.
• The “just post consistently and they’ll come” plan.
• The exchange-this-freebie-for-an-email plan.
• The look-successful-enough-and-someone-will-buy plan.

And after all that planning?…🦗Crickets.

It wasn’t that the tactics were bad. It’s that they weren’t mine.

They weren’t born from alignment.

They weren’t shaped in a space of clarity and truth. They were just borrowed roadmaps for someone else’s mountain.

What I didn’t know then that I know now is this:

You don’t need to know how to reach the goal.
You need to know how to prepare to receive it.

That’s the real work—and it’s the essence of Napoleon Hill’s sixth principle: Organized Planning, which I now call Preparation to Receive.

The problem isn’t the plan—
it’s how we define “planning.”

What most people think of as “planning” is really just a checklist of tactics.

It’s an attempt to predict and control every step before they’ve even anchored their desire or clarified what alignment actually feels like.

They skip the deep work. They skip the design part. They skip the part where the vision is shaped, refined, stretched, co-created, and tested before it starts to materialize.

I’ve done it. Maybe you have too.

The contrast we need to name:

Let’s look at the difference between typical planning and what Hill described as organized planning, which I now understand as a preparation plan to receive.

1. Where the Plan Comes From

Typical Planning:
Start with a goal, guess the how, and dive into action.

Preparation plan to Receive:
Start with desire → clarify purpose → engage imagination → create space for the path to unfold.

2. Who Builds It

Typical Planning:
Solo. Siloed. Sometimes panic-fueled.

Preparation plan to Receive:
Collaborative. Requires a “master mind” (aka aligned, wise counsel). You design in community, guided by wisdom.

3. How You Respond to Obstacles

Typical Planning:
“If it’s not working, maybe I’m not meant for this.” → give up or pivot too fast.

Preparation plan to Receive:
Persistence is the key. If a version fails, revise the version—not the vision.

4. What Fuels It

Typical Planning:
Urgency, fear, external pressure.

Preparation plan to Receive:
Desire, definiteness of purpose, imagination, faith.

5. Leadership Energy

Typical Planning:
Control, over-functioning, force.

Preparation plan to Receive:
Cooperation, harmony, shared responsibility. (And if there’s no harmony? It won’t work.)

6. Relationship to Failure

Typical Planning:
Failure = the end.

Preparation plan to Receive:
Failure = feedback. Adjust the structure, don’t abandon what you’re working towards

7. Value Exchange

Typical Planning:
Do X, get Y. Transactional.

Preparation plan to Receive:
What use value are you giving? What emotional and energetic integrity are you upholding? (Always give more in use value than you receive in cash value.)

8. Self-Awareness

Typical Planning:
Skipped or surface-level.

Preparation to Receive:
Deep self-knowing is non-negotiable. Your patterns, your vision, your constraints—they all must be brought into the light.

As Emerson said:

“There’s nothing capricious in nature, and the implanting of a desire indicates that its gratification is in the constitution of the creature that feels it.”

Translation?

If you have the desire, you have the capacity to fulfill it.
It wouldn’t be in you otherwise.

But you won’t reach it by copying tactics. You will reach it by preparing to receive it.

Dan Rockwell said it like this:

Just because successful people reach the peak doesn’t mean they know the best way up. Or how to get back down. Or what the mountain is for.

Right?

Stop copying someone else’s climb.

1. Build your own structure.
2. Ground yourself in your own clarity.
3. Get your own foundation in place.

What does a Preparation plan to Receive Look Like:

This is what my Business MRI reveals. It’s what I now teach. It’s what I had to live through to finally understand. Preparation to Receive is not about certainty.

It’s not about steps 1–2–3. It’s about non-negotiable conditions.

Here’s what it includes:

• Desire that belongs to you (not one you inherited or borrowed).
• Imagination to stretch possibility beyond the practical.
• A small, trusted circle to help you refine the path and test your thinking.
• Faith, not just as a concept—but as a practice.
• Structure that evolves. That grows with you. That holds you steady when nothing else is clear.
• Persistence that doesn’t panic.
• Peace, even when there’s pressure.

This is how the plan reveals itself.
This is how you stay open to what’s unfolding.
This is how your goal begins to meet you.

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Strategic Reflection Prompt:
Where am I still trying to “figure it all out” when I actually need to deepen my preparation to receive?

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P.S.
If the path feels foggy, it’s not because you’re doing it wrong.
You might just be missing structure where it matters most.

Start with the Business MRI™ and discover what’s quietly misaligned before it costs you time, energy, or revenue.

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