Incorporating Feedback Into Your Plan

Every action you take is an experiment you can improve from

You can’t intentionally change the future without planning. All effective action requires a plan. The more effectively you plan, the more effectively you will achieve what you want in the future. Most decisions are made without consciously planning. Leaving important things to automatic processes is almost always a bad idea for the same reason that throwing darts without aiming will never win the game. Nearly any subconscious plan is going to be inferior to any conscious plan.

Planning is simple in theory: You make good decisions by using your intelligence to enumerate options of action and estimate what would produce the greatest benefit. You list out potential positive and negative outcomes for each choice, and choose the choice with the greatest net benefit.

In situations big and small, it is very difficult to accurately predict the importance of specific actions ahead of time. As important as planning is, perhaps its greatest asset is in the benefits it renders when incorporated into a feedback loop with execution. Every decision you make is an experiment, and as such, provides the opportunity for you to improve your model of reality. As we take the path that seems more positive, we will know with a surety whether that path is how we imagined it; our actions result in the expected outcomes, for better or worse. This is a process that happens as quickly as our actions are bold.

As you execute your plans, you will frequently find your expectations violated. Sometimes, this happens with the pleasant surprise of things going better than you expected. The costs may be less than you expected, or the benefits greater than you expected. More often, things will go worse than you planned. The costs may be higher than expected, or the benefits might be lower than expected.

When your expectations are violated, you’ll have to traverse up the chain in your life plan to find the ideas you need to update to reconcile with what you’ve learned about reality.

Every decision you make should, at a minimum, feed back to your beliefs, either strengthening them through providing supporting evidence, or weakening them through providing counterexamples. Everything you do should either strengthen or weaken your beliefs. The strengthening of a given belief should result in you increasing in the boldness with which you act in that regard. The weakening of a particular belief should result in you being more cautious in how you act in that context, make you more receptive to alternatives to that belief, and potentially cause you to search for a better belief with which to replace the existing one.

The life plan is incremental; don’t worry about perfection

It’s an odd thing for most people to reconcile, but you need to master both the flexible and rigid aspects of the life plan. In order to unleash the power of the life plan, you will need to rigidly perform everything you say is most important and say no to all the things that would detract from it. At the same time, you can change your life plan at any time, and you should do so regularly. Your life plan is a tool that you control to help you get more of what you want. It isn’t something you are enslaved by.

Don’t keep doing what you know does not work. Don’t allow yourself to be drawn into sunken cost—that you can’t change a path due to how much you’ve put into the path so far. Don’t stick to certain tasks just because that’s the way it was done before. Your goal is your goal, not what you previously thought would achieve it. Your goals themselves exist only to further your purpose, and should be replaced if and when life reveals they do not do this. You control your beliefs; your beliefs do not control you. Your allegiance to past understanding will net you nothing. You get to decide what qualities you will possess. You get to decide what brings you joy.

In general, when you are disappointed in your expectations, exert the effort to find something that yields what you want. When you find something that provides what you seek better than any other alternative, double down on it, and stick with it until or unless it shows its limits.

Always remember that your life plan is yours alone. You can edit your life plan any time and as much as you want. Your ability to make any change you choose is part of the remarkable power of this framework, the other component being the power afforded by being accountable to what you choose to include in it.

Composing a life plan is a naturally iterative process. Don’t stress yourself about making it perfect. It could easily be years after adopting this framework before your purpose begins to maintain one form for a prolonged period of time. Tremendous benefits are available to you even while your life plan is in flux. It is far better to do more and better through executing an imperfect life plan than it is to persist without improvement while you endlessly work on designing what you believe will be a perfect life plan.

Don’t be discouraged when you perceive that it needs to be changed. If anything, be worried when it has been too long since you edited your plan. Every single change reflects learning and improvement, and the lack thereof might indicate you need to pay closer attention to or seek more of the feedback life provides you with. You’ll find that living what is on the sheet has a way of providing sufficient guidance for what to change and when. Change your plan when you have reason to, but don’t change your plan unless there has been a material change in the information upon which your plan is based. Remember, it’s a contract.

Changing the contract

As you regularly revisit your document, you are going to find apparent ways to make it better. The easiest changes to your life plan will be additions. Sometimes, you’ll see obvious elements that need to be removed. You’ll also see opportunities to edit or combine existing components.

The best way to know when to change any part of your life plan is to live it fully. While you execute, pay attention to any emerging evidence that suggests that the understanding has changed. If the understanding you used to generate your purpose, goals, and tasks, and which you used to prioritize your tasks has changed, you should modify these things accordingly and instantly.

During planning sessions, revisit what you are doing and have done since the last planning session. Ask yourself why you did what you did, and how well it matched the intended result. If there is a gap between what you intended and what actually happened, what lessons can you extract from the difference? What caused the results? What improvements might be made in the future? What can be done to continue to benefit from positive results? If the task is still in progress, what changes are necessary to draw your actions closer to the intended result?

After action review

Anything that is worth doing is worth evaluating. Review your day each day. Review things within your day. What did you learn, and how will you integrate it into your life plan?

You will only improve in the areas you measure. What were you expecting to happen? What actually happened? What changes can you make to improve results?

Think about what you are doing, how you are doing it, and why you are doing it. Is there a better way to get what you want? How can you reduce the time required? How can you improve quality? How can you make it easier? Find the best way to do things, then keep doing them that way until you find a reason to make a change.

Always devote a portion of your energy to the discovery of previously unknown options and new information regarding known options. For each action ask, “Is this the best way?”

Reducing friction and drag

As you carry out your life plan, notice and address any sources of friction or drag. Friction describes resistance that can make starting a task more difficult. The effects of friction are relatively constant, so the best way to overcome it is by being and doing better. Like friction, drag is resistance against your purpose, but it is not so easily overcome as friction. Drag increases the harder you try. It is an unavoidable fact that each additional increment of improvement will cost exponentially more energy. This is why the number of people who have overcome increasingly greater opposition shrinks exponentially.

One way to reduce drag is to reduce the resistance you produce. Your life is probably full of ways in which you unknowingly fight against what you say you value, and each of them will make it harder for you to advance your purpose in the same way a parachute makes it harder for a runner to sprint. Through identifying and removing those inconsistencies, you can streamline your life and enable greater progress in your purpose.

Drag can be reduced by changing the medium in which you operate. Changing the basis of where you live, work, and play can make a surprisingly outsized impact on your progress in what matters most to you in the same way that it is much easier to walk through air than water—816 times easier, in fact.

The last way to reduce drag is counterintuitive, and that is to intentionally reduce your speed. Drag increases with velocity. In fact, for every increment of velocity, drag will much more than double.¹ The more productive you are in life, the more drag will affect you.² Sometimes, taking more time to do fewer things of greater importance will result in greater overall progress in your purpose. If you attempt this remedy, remember the 80/20 rule: remove items from the 80% that are least important to you.