Plans are good when results are predictable
Plans are adverse when results are unpredictable
Most of us plan too much or too little or both
We don’t understand what makes planning appropriate
Most are unprofessional. Disorganised. Their chaotic actions reflect their ineptitude. Out of lack of sufficient challenge or ability — no discipline, no intellectual rigour is developed. Those people are unsuited to handle complex chains of cause and effect.
Most are also fearful. Habitual. Arrogant. What this presupposes is that we have an intrinsic desire for safety, certainty, predictability, control. Which comes with a whole collection of cognitive biases.
…and the tendency to plan! Particularly in the place of uncertainty. Plan what we don’t understand — so as to buy illusion of control.
We don’t distinguish between our desperate reliance on plans in order to curb uncertainty — and actual consciousness, actual intelligence, actual intelligent perception of reality, cause and effect, and subsequent interferences, conclusions, and finally, actual plans.
…YET ITS SO SIMPLE,
Plans are good when results are predictable
Plans are adverse when results are unpredictable
Plans are inexorable when dealing with tangible. Anything less is unprofessional, stupid.
Plans are not merely useless when dealing with unpredictable. Plans are outright adverse.
This is because plans serve as preconceptions. Which blind us both for (unpredictable) opportunity, and (unpredictable) danger.
Opportunity, gain — is obviously the whole point of the action in the first place.
Danger, however, is just danger. Danger to the whole undertaking, and potentially to you yourself, and the world around you.
Plans are not merely useless but blinding to opportunities and dangers.
But aren’t most things partially unpredictable and partially predictable…?
Obviously.
Wise understands the extent of his knowledge. The extent of his predictive power. The extent to which his experience aids him in the future.
The wise also understands the rewards of the new. Rewards of the not-known. Rewards of the not-understood.
He handles what he knows reasonably and explores what he not-knows energetically — while cautiously.
Don’t be the apparently carefree fool whose just careless and scattered. It will either get you nowhere or in trouble.
Don’t be the control freak, the epistemically arrogant, the deluded. You can only plan what is WELL KNOWN. You can’t plan what you not know and you can’t plan what is highly variable.
You must be profoundly conscientious with what is reachable by mind — and deeply reverent to what lies beyond it.
Now go set about this mysterious life and this strange world with this new intelligence.