Plans will fail

About a year ago I was working with Elsa as my personal coach. I’d make a list of things that I wanted to do, and at the end of the day, I’d discover that I hadn’t done what was on the list. I hadn’t wasted the day. I’d just done other stuff. That wasn’t what I wanted.

So we worked on making a plan so that I’d do what was on my list. We went over the plan again and again. We did premortems. Each time the plan got better. Finally, we had a plan that we couldn’t improve.

I said: “I’d be surprised if that failed.”

So what happened?

If failed, of course. But it failed in a surprising way.

So I was right. I was surprised when it failed.

But not the way I thought.

So we made another plan. That one lasted longer. Eventually, it failed.

A couple more iterations and the plan went on so long that when it failed, I didn’t care about it anymore. So I did not fix it. But I had learned how to fix it if I had cared.

You can’t always make fail-proof plans. Almost any plan that you make to teleport to Mars will fail. But you should at least think about failure modes.

And if there are too many, maybe you should plan on having a different goal.

Like astral projection to Mars.

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