I spent six months designing the perfect operational system. I had flowcharts for handling a complaint. I had a section in the brand bible that dictated the precise tone of voice for an instagram post. I was building a perfect, hermetically sealed container to manage the predictable chaos of running a service business.
While I was endlessly refining the blueprint, the real world was happening... weeks added up to months, and salaries added up to me running out of cash. Our first customers were getting a half-assed experience, and growth was at a snail's pace because I were too busy perfecting the "ideal experience" on paper.
The plan was a masterpiece. It was a beautiful, intricate excuse that kept anyone from doing the actual, messy, unpredictable work. I clung to it, because letting go would mean admitting the colossal amount of time and energy I'd poured into it was a waste.
A perfect example of the Sunk Cost Fallacy; a mass murderer of anything worth building.
You're in Love with Your Map, Not the Destination
Think of your project plan as a hand-drawn map. You spent ages on it. You researched every route, marked every stop. It’s a testament to your diligence. Maybe it's even got very nice doodles...
Then you start driving, and reality hits you in the face. A bridge is out. There's a diversion that isn't on your map. The beautiful artefact you invested so much in is now wrong.
What do you do?
You probably do what I did. You get angry at the roadblock. You stare at your beautiful map, wishing it were true. You try to find a way to follow the old roads, wasting time out of a misplaced loyalty to your own past effort.
You've fallen in love with the map and forgotten the point of it was to get somewhere.
The Real Enemy: The Cost of a New Plan
I'd like to think that the reason I kept to my plan wasn't plain stupidity, rather... the alternative was unthinkable.
The energy required to go back to a blank page—to admit the last six months of work were a learning experience at best, a total waste at worst—was immense. The thought of starting that high-effort "thinking" process all over again was so painful, so exhausting, that my brain made a choice: stick with the known, inefficient path.
Better the devil you know!
The Solution: Make Changing Your Mind Free
More grit won't save you. Ruthlessly lowering the cost of being wrong will. You need a to make adaptation so cheap and fast that the sunk cost of your old plan becomes irrelevant.
This is the idea of Quantizar. It is not a tool for creating a precious, static map. It is a real-time GPS for navigating messy reality.
When the roadblock appears, you don't have a crisis. You just give the GPS new information.
- "The venue fell through. We need a new launch plan for a location half the size."
- "Client feedback just killed our main feature. We need to pivot the project around the secondary one."
- "That API isn't coming. We need a new plan that assumes we build it ourselves."
Quantizar takes your current state and the new variable, and it recalculates the optimal path forward in seconds. It turns a week-long, soul-crushing re-planning session into a 30-second course correction. It makes the cost of changing your mind virtually zero.
More Options, Fewer Tombstones
When re-planning is free, your entire mindset changes. New information stops being a threat and starts being an advantage. You become fluid, adaptable, and lethal. You stop defending your ego and start making progress.
I designed a beautiful grave for my last business. The plan became a tombstone. Don't make the same mistake.
Stop worshiping the blueprint. Start building.