When Committing to Your Goals Stops Being a Good Thing
Breaking our promises to ourselves is how we build better lives around who we are today.
I make plans compulsively. When my wife and I went to a food truck festival with friends, I planned for how to maximize the number of stalls we could hit with minimal wait times. As soon as I got food from one stall, I rushed our friends to the next. God bless them for patiently following me along instead of telling me to chill the fuck out.
It’s not like I enjoy making plans. I do it because I buy into the illusion that, by making plans, I can control the future. But I can’t. It sounds ridiculous even as I type it out. So then, what are plans actually for?
Plans are about the present, not the future
Oliver Burke’s description of plans in Four Thousand Weeks resonates with me; because certainty is not guaranteed, our plans are nothing more than statements of intent. They’re good for exactly that reason: they clarify your intent in the present. They’re not guarantees of what will happen, and they’re not protections against the unexpected. Plans are incredibly fragile because they’re based on who we are and what we know now, not based on what will happen in the future.
