Do you know why the Panama Canal was built? Do you know why we made it to the moon? Or do you know why the light bulb was invented?

A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!
Before the Panama Canal, if you wanted to get a ship from California to New York there was some serious travel time involved. You had to go all the way around South America on a trip comparable to one around the world. Anyone can take a look at a map and see that putting the canal in Panama would be the most ideal to significantly shorten the trip.

To get to the moon, it would be an understatement to say there was a fair amount of work involved. Despite the massive amounts of data to crunch and problems to solve, engineers were able to figure them out and the end goal stayed the same. Get to the moon.

While working on the light bulb, there was over 900 prototypes before one actually worked as well as Thomas Edison wanted it to (That is another post about persistence). A little known fact is that Thomas Edison was actually the 23rd person to invent the light bulb (That in itself is a whole different post on persistence, strategy, and dedication!). The light bulb was really only part of the problem for Edison. The real problem was the fact that there were no electric lines running to people’s houses, that was the actual goal. Edison once said “We’ll make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles.”

While you could easily go deeper into the specifics of each one, there is one answer that explains all three. Because someone planned on it. Almost everything great that mankind has done has been planned out.

Not everything has to be planned out, but the achievements are much easier to chisel out when they are defined. Anybody can come up with a goal for something, and when put together with a killer plan you might actually have a shot at reaching it.