Book 231 - A Year of Magical Learning (Part 4/5)

Reflection Title: Meaningful Work Doesn’t Care About the Planning Fallacy!

Book – Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (Part 4 of 5)

Book Description:

In his mega bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, world-famous psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think.

System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation―each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions.

Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives―and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble.

Reflection:

The planning fallacy is a phenomenon in which predictions about how much time will be needed to complete a future task display an optimism bias and underestimate the time needed.

Did you know that when I initially sat down to begin to write my first book, I Can’t Imagine, that I thought I would complete it in a month? No joke! I was 100% sure that I could finish it one month and I had a lot of reasons why my system 2 logical brain felt that was a reasonable amount of time to predict when I would complete it.

Here were my “logical” reasons:

Time – I wasn’t working during the month I was planning on writing as I was still on bereavement leave after my daughter had passed away. In theory, I had all day to write until I couldn’t write anymore.

Motivation – The pain of losing my daughter and desire to share her life and story with the world were staring me right in the face every day. I knew I had to act, and I wouldn’t stop until I was finished.

Information - I had all the source information that anyone could ever need to write this story as I lived it AND documented in my journals to my daughter over the entire experience.

Outline – I had an outline of what I wanted to write about, stories I wanted to share, and how I planned to structure the book.

Plan – While I had never written a book before, I researched how authors like Stephen King and Maya Angelou planned their days and planned to mimic that process. They did 5 pages a day and proofread it before shutting it down and starting the next day. I figured I could easily do that as well.

I had only planned to have this book be about 100-150 pages total in my mind. I figured that I had 30 days, or 1 month to write it. That means following Stephen Kings process of 5 Pages a day would put me at 150 pages by the end of the month.

BOOM…completed book! It is that easy.

That all seems pretty logical…right?

In July 2020 I began writing. I had expected to be done in August 2020. Well, fast forward 8 months later and after writing every single morning, I still wasn’t done. The book was now almost 400 pages total, and I hadn’t done any proofreading hardly at all.

Don’t get me wrong, I was happy with the content I was producing. Truth be told, I’m glad it took so much longer as it turns out the story wasn’t completed yet anyway like I thought when I had first sat down to write it. In that 8-month period of time so many things started to happen from the compound effect of Emilia and I living our purpose every day that I wouldn’t have even been able to share had I actually completed it in my original time frame.

In March of 2021, I was successfully able to share the first draft copy with Emilia for her first birthday and I felt so proud.

I was ready to share her story with the world right away, but I forgot about the proofreading. No worries, I’ll just plan to hire someone to do that and do some myself and we should be done in a few weeks.

Wrong again! You think writing a book is hard…proofreading is THE WORST!

Writing the book is almost easy compared to proofreading. Draft revision after draft revision after draft revision! It felt like the process would never end. 4 months later, we finally had a final copy to share with the publisher for printing. I didn’t see that one coming at all.

It wasn’t until August of 2021, a full 13 months later after typing that first word that I was finally able to share Emilia’s story with the world. Talk about the planning fallacy in action.

Here’s the biggest lesson I’ve learned through this process, don’t plan…just do.

The planning fallacy will exist with everything you try to bring in this world. Nothing every goes according to plan, but meaningful work is how you can transform the planning fallacy from a negative to a positive.

After all, who cares how long it takes to bring your art into the world? If anything, I’m thankful that it took so long as it gave me more time with the project, which meant more time with my values in action, more time with my purpose, which ultimately means more time with my daughter. Even though creating that project was a labor of love and one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done in my life, I would do it again and again and again in a heartbeat because it was meaningful to me. I’ll never forget those days of crying at the keyboard as I shared my daughter’s story and how she changed my life. This is what I care most about in this world.

This Year of Magical Learning feels the exact same. I’m loving every minute of it. It is going to take me probably 4 years to complete this start to finish, but I don’t care. Now that I just said that out loud, it will probably be way longer…that actually makes me excited and not terrified.

Question: How do you combat the planning fallacy?

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Links:

What is The Year of Magical Learning? - An Introduction

YOML Podcast Discussion - Coming Soon

YOML Bookstore - Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman