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.