🧭 Whose plan am I actually following?

Last week I asked how sure you feel about your online plans right now.

Not one person picked "sure enough to keep going."

I've been thinking about that all week, and I have a hunch about why. It's hard to feel sure about a plan that was never really yours.

I spent about ten years following other people's plans. Not bad plans, either – some of them worked fine, for the person who wrote them. One had me posting twice a day on a platform I quietly disliked, because the fellow who wrote it was good at that platform and I assumed that meant I had to be. I lasted five weeks. That was the shape of it for years: I'd get a little way in, something would go quiet in me, and I'd decide I wasn't cut out for this. It took an embarrassingly long time to notice the pattern wasn't about me. It was about whose plan it was.

By the end of this you'll:

Here's the thing nobody mentions when they hand you a plan: a plan carries the assumptions of the person who built it.

Someone who loves being on camera builds a plan with video in it. Someone with ten hours a week builds a plan that needs ten hours a week. Someone who's been online for fifteen years builds a plan that quietly assumes you already know what a landing page is.

None of that is dishonest. Their plan fits them, the way a coat fits the person it was cut for. You can wear it. It'll be tight across the shoulders and you won't know why.

An inherited step has a particular feel to it. It's the one that keeps sliding onto tomorrow's list. Not because it's hard, some of them are easy, but because every time you look at it some part of you asks who said so, and you don't have an answer.

And when it doesn't fit, you don't usually think wrong coat. You think wrong me.

There's a simple way to find out which parts of your plan are actually yours.

→ Tonight, write down the three or four steps you think you're supposed to be taking. Then put a mark next to each one you'd still do if nobody had told you to.

That's it. Three or four lines and a few marks.

What usually happens is that two or three get a mark straight away. You'd do those anyway, they make sense to you, you can picture yourself doing them on a Tuesday evening after supper. Then one or two sit there unmarked, and you realize you've been carrying them because someone said they were essential.

The unmarked ones are where not being sure enough to keep going lives. Not in the whole plan. In the borrowed bits.

There's decent evidence behind this. Researchers who study goals in later life keep finding that people who set goals for their own reasons stick with them longer, and report a stronger sense that their life is going somewhere. The goals themselves seem to matter less than whose they were.

On that, one tap:

I'm asking because I'd rather build the next thing around what you actually need than guess at it.

Do the sort and you end up with a shorter plan. Not a better one, a shorter one, made of things you'd have done anyway. Shorter plans tend to get finished.

The unmarked steps don't have to be thrown out, either. Some will turn out to matter, and you can come back and choose them properly later. The point isn't to cut your plan down to nothing. It's to know which parts you are carrying because you decided to.

Don't do it, and nothing bad happens. You'll keep a couple of steps you never chose, they'll keep being the ones you put off, and you'll keep reading that as evidence about yourself rather than evidence about the steps.

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You're not behind. You might just be holding a coat that was cut for somebody else.

Talk soon,
Bob

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