Do Not Plan

Steinbeck was right about Mice and Men

Goal seeking is

• deciding what to do,

• making a plan to do it,

• and then doing that thing whilst sacrificing other things.

To be properly goal seeking, the last part is important. You cannot train for a marathon without giving up the time that you would be eating Cheetos.

Goals have time horizons. Some are short term lasting minutes, like making a cup of coffee. Others goals might involve plans for years. Both people and organisations can goal seek. You might wish to aim for a promotion at work. Your personal long term plan might be to be famous on TikTok. Or your organisation might be trying to build some sort of huge product like a space shuttle within 5 years.

My claim is that goal seeking is a bad strategy for any horizon longer than a week. This rule applies to most people, as well as organisations and governments. It is the reason why most ambitious government projects fail.

I have believed this for three years. So I do not goal seek with my career by deciding what I need to do then attempting it for the next year. I do not aim for a promotion or targets. Nor do I attempt to goal seek big projects in my personal life or in my hobbies. I will explain why I don’t goal seek personally, and then describe my alternative method of doing stuff.

Long term goal seeking is bad because I get bored with trying to stick with something for a long time. Boredom kills my motivation, and so I become unproductive. At that point, it becomes marginally better to quit in favour of something I like more. This happened with a particular chemistry project I was working on, which I quit in favour of physics in theoretical biology.

So how do you become successful if you quit once you get bored? Doesn’t the current Substack intelligentia subscribe to the idea of a forcing function to make you stick with your goal?

Here is my rebuttal:

• being successful by any metric likely does not matter, so you may as well be having fun.

• but if you did want to be crazy successful, you would have to be lucky

  • if you are not lucky, then you should at least be having fun

  • if you somehow are lucky, you need to work hard

    • but to work hard at something, you need to enjoy it,

      • therefore, you need to quit if you’re not having fun.

All the routes above involve not being bored. So quit if you are.

The next reason why goal seeking is bad is because it’s a waste of time due to world uncertainty and chaos. My various investigations in the physics of dynamics systems have convinced me that the majority of the natural world is unpredictable. If we can’t model three body pendulum, then how are we supposed to model the success of our plans? Moreover, my career in finance has taught me that one always underestimates the potential for unknown unknowns. Because of this, too much planning is a waste of time. Time is scarce so you take an L if you spend it planning.

The next reason is moral and values uncertainty. Throughout my life I have been everywhere on the political spectrum - socialist, YIMBY, conservative, centrist, libertarian and all. So if my values change due to new information, these are unlikely to be compatible with the current plan I’m on. If I force myself to stick with a plan, this can cause painful conflict if my values start to diverge from it. For example, I used to be a fairly strong utilitarian, whereas now I take a more holistic approach that aligns with personal interest and some degree of epicureanism. But I found some of my projects during my utilitarian phase to be painful to continue.

Long term goal seeking is also bad because it tricks you that you’re going to stick to something, which makes you more likely to defer it. This is similar to metric and reward hacking, where you optimise for some number that is unrelated to what you are trying to achieve.

But still, most people claim that to do big things you need a plan. The space shuttle programme and moon landings are often cited as an example. But this is not how engineering works. The most successful engineering projects have been modular and testable in stage-by-stage chunks, not through moonshot ambitious planning. Do you think the space shuttle programmes would have even been an option if we hadn’t nailed propulsion first?

And you may ask - how do long term infrastructure projects get done? For example, railways? Well, it would be better if infrastructural planners thought more incrementally as well. Instead of the financial and infrastructural failure like the HS2 railway, the UK might have done better first trying to build quality infrastructure locally and then incrementally adding things one.

Ok, so what’s the alternative? To me, its doing incremental things at the daily horizon that roughly align with your personal values at the time. And then I go from there. For example, when I write this blog I look at stuff I’ve written and see how I can improve the ideas. I try to write what I can with those ideas for the day.

And then things get big through piecing together stuff i’ve already built in the direction want. I think stuff like ‘Ok, so I have a bunch of theories I’ve written about in fluids and biology, can I string them together in a meaningful way with in a day’s work?’. That way, I am not trying to accomplish things with parts that haven’t arrived yet. Rather, I have the confidence to use what I got to do more.

This makes me come across as a more reliable person to my peers. This is because the incremental method means I don’t promise big things that I haven’t done yet. And this also contributes to my success rate because people believe in me more.