Discipline
Your Plan Will Fail. Hill Says That's Part of the Instructions.
Principle 6: organised planning is the longest chapter in the book, and its central claim is that plan failure is expected, routine and non-fatal.
Hill's instruction is not to make a good plan. It is to build a new one every time the last one collapses, without ever treating the collapse as a verdict on you.
Organised planning is where desire becomes a schedule. Hill's process is procedural: assemble the people whose help you need, agree what each of them gets in return, meet regularly until a workable plan exists, and maintain perfect harmony within the group because a plan built on friction won't survive contact with reality.
Then comes the line that carries the chapter. If the first plan fails, replace it with a new one. If that fails, replace it again, and keep replacing until one works. Temporary defeat means only that the plan was unsound — not that the aim was wrong and not that you lack the capacity.
That reframe is the practical value of the whole chapter, because plan failure is where most people quit. The failure feels like evidence about them. Hill insists it is evidence about the method, and the only correct response is a revision meeting.
The chapter also carries his catalogue of the thirty major causes of failure, which reads uncomfortably like a personal audit: lack of a well-defined purpose, lack of self-discipline, procrastination, indecision, the wrong selection of a vocation, over-caution, and guessing instead of thinking. It's worth reading slowly and marking the three that apply to you.
His account of leadership is similarly brisk. The leadership traits he lists — self-control, definiteness of decision, doing more than paid for, sympathy and understanding, mastery of detail, willingness to take responsibility — are all behaviours rather than personality features, which means they can be practised.
The whole chapter is an argument against the two most common failure modes: having no written plan at all, and having exactly one plan you're emotionally attached to. Write the plan, run it, kill it when it fails, and write the next one the same week.
Practical Value
Build plan A — and schedule the review that kills it
- 01Write your aim, then list every person whose cooperation you need and what each one gets in return.
- 02Draft the plan as dated steps with owners, not as a description of intentions.
- 03Book a fixed review date now — fortnightly is enough — to judge the plan on evidence.
- 04At each review, ask one question: is this plan producing movement? If not, replace it that day.
- 05Read Hill's causes of failure, mark the three that describe you, and pick one to work on this month.
