Prospective retrospective

Tomorrow is my birthday, assuming that I publish this today–and I predict that I will.

I spent the morning catching up with my friend Elsa. This post is dedicated to her because I needed a better reason to post than it’s the day before my birthday. So I said I would, and now I won’t disappoint. Anyone else want a post dedicated to them? Ask, and you shall be given.

Here’s part of the chat:

Do you remember when you were coaching me and we made a plan and you checked in with me and I said that the plan had failed and that I was not surprised?

And I realized that I made lots of plans that (if I had been asked) I would have predicted would have failed. But I never had asked

So we came up with a new process. Make a plan. Predict the outcome. If the prediction was failure, then predict reasons for failure, take them into account in the plan.

The goal was a plan that would either succeed or if it failed would fail in an unexpected way

Quoting from a blog post:

“I remembered an earlier time, working with Elsa, my personal coach. I’d made a plan and didn’t do what I had planned to do. When we talked about it, I said that I wasn’t surprised that my plan had failed. I’d made plans that had failed hundreds of times before. My failure was unsurprising. We then worked to make a plan that might fail—but whose failure would at least be surprising.”

Haha I could have saved all that typing just by quoting Past Me

Fucking brilliant guy, Past Me.

Indeed!

Moving backward: I started chatting with her because last night, as I was drafting a post, I asked myself whether or not I’d end up finishing and posting it.

What did I predict I would do?

I predicted that I would not.

And I was right.

But before I was right, I thought: if I’m intending to publish a blog post and predict that I will not do it, then there’s something wrong.

And that reminded me of Elsa.

Something was wrong.

I set out to discover what was wrong and correct it.

This post provides some evidence that I’m on the right track.

Meanwhile, I’m going to post this one and make my prediction accurate.

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