A Mason's Work

[00:00] For most people, their plans fail before they ever kind of hit reality.
[00:06] Not because of the discipline or the goal was wrong or you ran out of time.
[00:12] They fail because of a confusion that is kind of so pervasive and so elusive at the same time that most people never actually understand what it is.
[00:25] And here is why most plans fail.
[00:28] The person who makes the plan is typically not the person who has to execute.
[00:36] You heard that right.
[00:37] When you create a plan, it is very likely that all of the things you're experiencing, all of the things that you're having going on right now have very little to do with the tomorrow version of yourself or the later today version of yourself or the 10 year away version of yourself.
[00:57] That has to execute.
[00:59] Think about it this way.
[01:00] If you were to like start knitting a sweater while the wool is still on the sheep, you're not actually going to get anywhere.
[01:10] You're working with a fantasy of what might be and what it might feel like and what you might do with it.
[01:18] It doesn't really work when we start putting ourselves or painting ourselves into these idealized corners of what should happen.
[01:29] We do this all the time.
[01:32] We meal plan while hungry for dessert and then wonder why all we have planned for the week is desserts.
[01:38] We commit to early morning workouts at 10 o'clock at night when we feel rested and we over schedule ourselves.
[01:48] We make big promises about, you know, I'm never going to eat this kind of thing again or this.
[01:55] I'm never going to drink again or whatever the indulgence of the moment is from the perspective of the present moment.
[02:03] And those present moments in a lot of ways are a type of betrayal.
[02:08] And so we'll talk about this over the course of this week about planning and how do we meaningfully do this in a way that works for who we are as people, both in the present moment and in the future.
[02:20] And one of the sort of operative Mason reframes here for us is that we have to understand the ground we're working in before we place the first stone.
[02:32] We have to know kind of what's going on.
[02:36] You don't apply the level to the stone.
[02:38] It's applied to the foundation.
[02:40] If you don't know where you're standing and what you're standing on, everything above it is provisional.
[02:48] It's a best guess, which is one of the reasons why over the past couple of weeks, we've been focusing a lot on understanding yourself, being honest with yourself and knowing what's going on internally.
[02:58] And now we're going to start looking out at the world around us and trying to find out how do we take this one version of who we are and apply it to making plans.
[03:11] So here is the practice, right?
[03:14] One of the things that you have to do before you even start any kind of planning and it changes the entire sort of conceptual process right out of the gate.
[03:26] Before you plan the first thing, you have to make a plan for what happens when stuff goes sideways.
[03:35] So you're going to plan to do these elaborate, amazing things, and I am certain they are wonderful plans.
[03:44] But you have to understand that when it meets reality, you have to have the agility to respond.
[03:50] So if you plan first how you expect to get back on the horse once you fall off, before you even get on the horse the first time, you're setting future versions of yourself up for positive success.
[04:02] This isn't like pessimism.
[04:04] This isn't like I'm going to screw this up.
[04:05] This is an understanding that the practice of our lives requires some failover tolerance.
[04:14] It requires us to be able to have the agility and the care as we plan, as we look towards our future self to allow for all of that kind of flexibility and learning and spontaneity and all of the things.
[04:31] If you create space for these things as the worshipful master of your life and create these opportunities for you to adapt and provide the sort of room, the cognitive and emotional room to have things go sideways, you're beginning to build a plan that when you look out across time has resilience and capacity and capability.
[04:57] It also doesn't commit you in the future versions of yourself to an unsustainable standard that will end up turning into emotional sort of baggage over time.
[05:11] Every time you say, well, I'm not going to ever do that again, or, oh, man, I'm going to eat healthy forever and ever.
[05:16] Every time you fail that, you're adding just a little bit of like a penny weight onto your consciousness where you're just like, oh, man, last time I made that promise, I broke it again.
[05:27] And as that kind of builds up over time, it actually creates some emotional drag.
[05:31] So first things first in the planning process, begin with the capacity to pivot and get back on.
[05:42] Get off plan, get on plan, test that as part of your moving forward process.
[05:48] We'll talk a little bit more about this over the next couple of episodes because planning is a very tricky thing that not a lot of folks understand how to do.
[05:57] Thank you.
[05:58] Thank you.