One of the 48 Laws of Power. Very dangerous advice, as it leads to the trap of inflexibility and tunnel vision. It is good to have a general vision of your goal and your plan, but it is far better to deal with the specifics as they arise.

IBM has been attempting for decades to develop a computer program that can defeat a human player in chess. Originally, they worked on the assumption that all that needed to be done was to design a system that looked farther ahead in the game than humans. However, after some pretty brutal defeats, they did some research into how humans played chess and got some remarkable results. Chessmasters rarely consider more than two or three moves at any given time, and they rarely think ahead more than two to three moves. They simply make the best possible move in the present situation, which is much better advice than trying to see through to a distant end.

In a side note, a computer named Deep Blue, which works on a heuristic method much closer to the human style of play managed to soundly defeat human master Gary Kasparov in 1999.