Plans must survive pessimism, not optimism.
When you build a plan, you build it on a good day. The numbers are generous because you're imagining the version where everything goes roughly right – the launch lands, the customers convert, the month behaves itself. It's a plan for the world as you'd like it.
The world isn't like that. The launch slips. Half the people who said they'd buy don't. The thing that was meant to take a week takes three, because something always does. Real life rounds down.
So I've learned to build plans that work even when they're disappointing. Not pessimistic plans – I'm not interested in talking myself out of things. Plans that have enough slack in them that a bad month is survivable rather than fatal.
The optimistic plan only works if the world cooperates, and the world has never once felt obliged to cooperate with me. The plan that survives the bad version is the only one worth having, because the bad version is the one you'll usually get.
Hope is not a forecast. Plan for the world as it is.
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