A Mason's Work

[00:00] So for a living, I help folks write business plans.
[00:04] And one of the things that is really important, and we talk about it a lot in sort of my profession,
[00:10] is that most business plans become shelfware.
[00:13] One of the reasons that that happens is because they go through the planning process once,
[00:18] and then they never do the things required to essentially iterate on that plan when reality
[00:25] comes up.
[00:25] When we talk about planning and building agency and capacity and not essentially having
[00:32] it become this emotional sort of tech debt to your own everyday life, we're going to
[00:38] need to understand what a review cycle is, what it looks like, and how we make that work
[00:45] on the relative sort of time horizons we're talking about.
[00:48] So think back to the last episode, that young man who wanted to become a sailor or, you
[00:55] know, go rock climbing.
[00:57] You know, allocating time is sort of one part of the conversation.
[01:02] Reading the environment is another for sure.
[01:06] That's all good work.
[01:07] But that was done at a specific point in time.
[01:10] There's lots of reality that will happen between the date that that plan was established and
[01:17] six months in.
[01:18] Not the least of which is the person who made those plans and the person who's executing
[01:23] those plans has changed.
[01:26] So as we're talking about things like failure modes and the ability to get back on the horse,
[01:32] one of the very first things you have to give yourself permission to do in the planning
[01:37] process is find off ramps to your plan.
[01:40] I know that's madness, right?
[01:42] I don't want to create a plan that immediately has like, yeah, I'm done with this.
[01:46] However, it is entirely appropriate for every plan of action that you pursue to have a set
[01:54] of conditions by which you believe or you think it's appropriate to exit.
[01:59] So if you build the exit strategy in from the jump, again, that's not failure.
[02:05] That was a designed off ramp to the plan.
[02:07] You kind of got to have that.
[02:09] You also need to have the, hey, I got derailed.
[02:13] The situation that I'm in now, I couldn't have anticipated this other condition emerging or this
[02:19] thing happening.
[02:21] Now, what do I do?
[02:23] Well, if you've done some of your on-ramp or some of your failure planning and how do you
[02:28] get back on the horse effectively, chances are you've met these situations and you kind
[02:33] of immediately got back on the horse.
[02:34] In a review cycle, when you're busy looking at that plan to figure out, is it working?
[02:40] Is it not working?
[02:41] What needs to change or pivot?
[02:43] You want to make sure you note the number of times you were able to use some of those
[02:49] get back on the horse sort of techniques that you had.
[02:52] In the same way, if you were planning the rock climbing or planning the sailing thing,
[02:57] you might have not been able to meet the challenge.
[03:01] You might not have been able to climb that one rock.
[03:03] Holy moly, I didn't even know that this was a skill that I had to develop to get there.
[03:09] Or I went sailing and I found that I had a really traumatic experience because I couldn't
[03:14] get back in the timeline I expected because the winds had changed.
[03:18] When we start looking at these things, we have to be able to, again, count our successes for
[03:26] when we were able to get back on the horse, determine whether or not we're in a position
[03:30] where we want to off ramp.
[03:31] And if so, that's okay.
[03:34] And then for the balance, we essentially need to treat the present moment as almost like a
[03:40] new start.
[03:40] You're perpetually in the moment you're in.
[03:45] You're perpetually restarting the plan every day.
[03:50] This is an odd thing to think because a lot of folks are like, well, I want to track it on a
[03:55] series of milestones and I want to know where I am relative to where I originally started and all
[03:59] that kind of stuff.
[04:00] And that's fine for looking back and creating a sort of a chronology or an inventory or history.
[04:07] And it's good stuff, right?
[04:08] And so I'm not suggesting you don't do it.
[04:10] But in the planning conversation where, again, you're trying to build emotional resilience over
[04:15] time, you're trying to build capacity over time and agency over time, every day you execute the
[04:21] plan is day zero, right?
[04:24] You are in day zero right now for plans you set years and years ago.
[04:31] When you go through this and you start looking at what do I need to do again on tomorrow's time
[04:36] horizon or the one after that or the day after that or the next phase of my life,
[04:40] those plans and designs must adapt.
[04:45] Again, I know that we're not necessarily going to always be able to do that.
[04:51] Some things, like if you are literally designing a building, you've got to have a line in the
[04:56] sand on some stuff.
[04:58] However, what we often run into in our own plan and designing process because of the emotional
[05:05] nature of being a human being and because the environment is always just a little bit different,
[05:10] we have to be able to be at day zero and be okay with that every time we review our plan.
[05:19] That allows us to essentially take in all the environmental criteria of legitimately what's
[05:25] going on right now against what you've already successfully achieved and what you've struggled
[05:30] with and rebuild and build a stronger plan moving forward.
[05:37] As you go through this process, you're going to find there's a ton of opportunities to, again,
[05:41] build new off ramps, build new on ramps, but you become agile in the present moment because really
[05:46] that's all you have is the present moment anyway.
[05:48] These are a series of present moments that emerge one after the next.
[05:53] In that planning process, you're going to take the best information you can right now to build
[05:59] a plan that the next version of yourself is going to have the most likely potential to execute.
[06:05] Take a quick look.
[06:06] And take it.