Planning is a comfort mechanism. It soothes uncertainty, creating the illusion of control. But the longer you plan, the less it serves you. Paralysis creeps in. The cost of overplanning is the opportunity you never seized.

The most successful people understand that preparation has diminishing returns. There is a point where more planning does not improve execution—it delays it. Those who win act before they feel fully ready. They move forward while others are still fine-tuning irrelevant details.

Jeff Bezos calls it the 70% rule—make a decision when you have roughly 70% of the information you wish you had. Wait for certainty, and you will be too late. Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, takes it further: “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you launched too late.”

The fear of imperfection kills momentum. Yet, nothing great was ever built in a single perfect draft. Edison did not plan the perfect light bulb. He created, tested, failed, and adjusted—thousands of times.

Winners launch before they are comfortable. They iterate in real time, learning faster than those who sit on the sidelines tweaking the blueprint. The battle is won in the doing, not in the preparing.

So, yes—planning is useful. But the real work begins when you leap. If you wait until you feel ready, you never will.