Are Your Life Plans More Convoluted than Die Hard 2?

John McClane, protagonist of the Die Hard movies, is quite the action hero. He has foiled 4 different terrorist plots that rang in scope from taking over a building to shutting down the country. McClane is an amazingly capable badass, but it’s not just his own prowess that allows him to succeed. No, he is helped by the fact that his opponents tend to convolute the heck out of their plans.

This past weekend I re watched Die Hard 2: Die Harder. It’s actually a fairly entertaining, if mindless, movie (guess the “mindless” part goes without saying, eh?). It wasn’t very well received, and I think that is for two reasons:

1. It suffers in comparison to the original Die Hard.
2. It is truly ridiculous.

There are many ridiculous things about Die Hard 2: John McClane happens to once again be in the middle of a terrorist plot. Bruce Willis’s wife happens to be on a plane with the dumbass reporter from the first Die Hard. Laws of physics are summarily ignored. Grenades take forever to explode when it helps the plot. A bad gut is out run by an airport moving walkway. Two men die in a massive shoo tout in the hidden “baggage conveyor belt area” (that scene is like the swinging doors scene from Monster’s Inc, but with guns. And Bruce Willis) using automatic weapons, and not only do the police not take this seriously, but they don’t even close off the crime scene. Amazing.

But the most ridiculous aspect of the movie is the villain’s ridiculously convoluted plot. I could go on and on making fun of how unnecessarily involved their plan is, but Cracked.com already wrote a very entertaining article on the subject. You can read their take Die Hard 2 (and four other bad villain plots) here.

In a nutshell, a former special forces operative wants to get a drug lord freed. The drug lord is flying in to Dulles Airport, so the soldier recruits a team to:

1. Infiltrate the airport by passing guns to each other in gift boxes
2. Hack in to take control of all communication between the airport and the planes
3. Set up an ambush at what will be the airport’s most likely response
4. Be in cahoots with a legitimate current special forces unit who they assume will be sent in
5. Set up a fake shoot out with the special forces unit which involves shooting blanks at each other to stage a shootout

Oh, and by the way, this entire plot hinges on there happening to be a blizzard on the day the drug lord is being flown into Dulles. A blizzard which:

1. Must be bad enough to prevent any of the pilots from visually seeing the landing strip…
2. …but not be so bad that the flights will be cancelled or diverted in advance.

Wow. Is your head spinning yet? Mine is about to explode…

It’s easy to watch a movie like Die Hard 2 and laugh at how overly complicated the bad guys made their plan. However, if you spend any time talking to people about their life goals and plans, you’ll see that they tend to make their plans (if they them) just as complicated. And that is no laughing matter.

It’s easier than you think to overcomplicate your plans. Here are are three ways to make sure your plan is less convoluted than a Die Hard villain’s scheme:

Maximize How Much Is In Your Own Control

In your plan, how many of the steps are things that rely on your actions vs. things that rely on other people taking action? The more things you can bring under your control, the more successful you’ll be.

In Die Hard 2, the bad guys leave a lot to chance. Primarily, their entire plan revolves around a snowstorm hitting Washington D.C. at the exact time they want to hatch their scheme. Not just any snowstorm mind you, but a blizzard so bad that it completely eliminates the pilots’ visibility!

Sure, it snows in D.C., but how frequently does it snow so bad that everything shuts down? A couple of times a year? Maybe? And what are the chances that that blizzard will hit on the night you need it to? That’s leaving a pretty critical element up to fate…

Sounds crazy for the Die Hard bad guys, but we do this all the time in our own plans. For example, you can have a plan that says, “I am going to do presentations in front of targeted groups and then people in the audience will want to hire me.”

Sounds like an ok plan, until you realize that once you finish speaking, you have left everything else out of your control. You are leaving it up to the audience to think about hiring you, go back to their office and try to sell you, and then contact you themselves.

A better plan would be, “I am going to do presentations in front of targeted groups. I will collect business cards in return for a free gift so I can collect contact info. I will then email a thank you to everyone afterward (and the thank you email will have info about my services) and then I will call each person on the phone to talk about working with them and getting referrals.”

See how the second plan puts a lot more of the process into your control? Guess which version has a higher likelihood of success?

Lesson: The more you put your fate in your own hands, the better off you’ll be. Take control and take action!

Minimize the Number of Breakdown Points

In Dies Hard 2, the plan involves something like 237 distinct steps. They needed to sneak guns in. They needed to cut the communication wire. It needed to snow. The proper special ops team needed to be called in. And so on and so on…If any one of those steps failed, so too would the plan.

Each step in your plan is a “breakdown point.” The more steps, the more opportunities there are for something to go wrong.

See if you can simplify your plan as much as possible. Remove unnecessary steps. Replace three roundabout steps with one concise one.

Often we add in steps because:

1. We are following someone else’s plan which may be convoluted in and of itself
2. We are trying to avoid the simple route because we don’t like it or
3. We believe things are more complicated than they really are.

These are bad, bad traps to fall into. Reduce the number of steps, reduce the breakdown points, and keep things as simple as possible!

Lesson: Simplify, simplify, simplify!

Be Direct!

One of the best ways to simplify is to identify the most direct route to achieve your goal. In Die Hard 2, the bad guys objective was to get a drug lord and South American dictator freed from custody. Is it just me or don’t there seem to be many more direct ways of achieving that goal? If you have the technical expertise, manpower, and equipment to carry out an elaborate plan to hijack every aspect of an airport, don’t you think you could just launch a jailbreak? Or kidnap another diplomat and make a trade? Or hijack just his plan, and not the whole airport? I’m just saying…

Whatever your goal is, chances are that these is a short, direct path to achieving it. Make sure you first identify what that path is, and then do your best to stay as close to that path as possible. A little flexibility and variety is fine, but every step further away you take, the longer and harder your path will be.

Lesson: Identify the direct route and then take it!

It’s hard enough achieving the major goals in your life. Don’t make your life harder by over complicating what should be a simple plan. Keep things in your control, simplify, and take the direct route. That’s the surest way to success – unless you want your life to be an over the top Hollywood action move!

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