Why We Overestimate Set-Up
You’re sitting on a plane from London to New York. How much of the time is it sticking to the flight path, do you think? 90 percent of the time? 80 percent of the time? 70 percent of the time? The correct answer is never. Sitting beside the window, gazing out at the edge of the wing, you can watch the jumpy little ailerons—they’re there to make constant adjustments to the flight path. Thousands of times per second, the autopilot recalculates the gap between where the plane is and where it should be and issues corrective instructions.
I’ve often had the pleasure of flying small planes without autopilot, when it’s my job to carry out these minuscule adjustments. If I release the joystick even for a second, I drift off course. You’ll recognize the feeling from driving a car: even on a dead-straight motorway, you can’t take your hands off the wheel without veering out of your lane and risking an accident.
Our lives work like a plane or a car. We’d rather they didn’t—that they ran according to plan, foreseeable and undisturbed. Then we’d only have to focus on the set-up, the optimal starting point. We’d arrange things perfectly at the beginning—education, career, love life, family—and reach our goals as planned. Of course, as I’m sure you know, it doesn’t work like that. Our lives are exposed to constant turbulence, and we spend much of our time battling crosswinds and the unforeseen caprices of the weather. Yet we still behave like naïve fair-weather pilots: we overestimate the role of the set-up and systematically underestimate the role of correction.
As an amateur pilot I’ve learned that it’s not so much the beginning that matters but the art of correction following take-off. After billions of years, nature knows it too. As cells divide, copying errors are perpetually being made in the genetic material, so in every cell there are molecules retroactively correcting these errors. Without this process of DNA repair, as it’s known, we’d die of cancer hours after conception. Our immune system follows the same principle. There’s no master plan, because threats are impossible to predict. Hostile viruses and bacteria are constantly mutating, and our defenses can only function through perpetual correction.
So next time you hear that an apparently perfect marriage between two perfectly well-matched partners is on the rocks, don’t be too surprised. It’s a clear case of set-up overestimation. Frankly, anyone who’s spent more than five minutes in a relationship should already know that without ongoing fine-tuning and repairs, it doesn’t work. All partnerships have to be consistently nurtured. The most common misunderstanding I encounter is that the good life is a stable state or condition. Wrong. The good life is only achieved through constant readjustment.
Then why are we so reluctant to correct and revise? Because we interpret every little piece of repair work as a flaw in the plan. Obviously, we say to ourselves, our plan isn’t working out. We’re embarrassed. We feel like failures. The truth is that plans almost never work out down to the last detail, and if one does occasionally come off without a hitch, it’s purely accidental. As the American general—and later president—Dwight Eisenhower said, “Plans are nothing. Planning is everything.” It’s not about having a fixed plan, it’s about repeated re-planning—an ongoing process. The moment your troops meet your opponents’, Eisenhower realized, any plan is going to be obsolete.
Political constitutions lay out the fundamental laws on which all other legislation rests, and in theory should be timeless. Yet not even constitutions go unrevised. The constitution of the United States—originally signed in 1787—has been amended twenty-seven times so far. The Federal Constitution of the Swiss Confederation has undergone two thorough-going revisions since 1848 and dozens of partial ones. The German constitution of 1949 has been altered sixty times. This isn’t an embarrassment; it’s eminently sensible. A capacity for correction is the foundation of any functional democracy. It’s not about electing the right man or the right woman (i.e., the “right set-up”); it’s about replacing the wrong man or the wrong woman without bloodshed. Democracy has a built-in correction mechanism—and it’s the only form of government that does.
In other areas, unfortunately, we’re even less willing to correct ourselves. Our school system is largely geared toward the set-up: the emphasis on factual knowledge and certifications makes it seem like life is primarily about getting the best possible grades and giving our careers the best possible jump-start. Yet the connection between degrees and workplace success is growing ever more tenuous, while the ability to self-correct is growing ever more important—even though it’s hardly taught at school.
The same phenomenon is apparent in the development of our characters. I’m sure you know at least one person you’d consider a wise and mature individual. What do you think: was it the set-up—the perfect genes, an ideal upbringing, a first-class education—that made this person so wise? Or was it acts of correction, of constant work on their own issues and shortcomings, a gradual elimination of these inadequacies from their lives?
The upshot? We’ve got to get rid of the stigma attached to correction. People who self-correct early on have an advantage over those who spend ages fiddling with the perfect set-up and crossing their fingers that their plans will work out. There’s no such thing as the ideal training. There’s more than one life goal. There’s no perfect business strategy, no optimal stock portfolio, no one right job. They’re all myths. The truth is that you begin with one set-up and then constantly adjust it. The more complicated the world becomes, the less important your starting point is. So don’t invest all your resources into the perfect set-up—at work or in your personal life. Instead, practice the art of correction by revising the things that aren’t quite working—swiftly and without feeling guilty. It’s no accident that I’m typing these lines in Word 14.7.1. Version 1.0 hasn’t been on the market for years.