The best way

Beats waiting for hours on the tarmac, I suppose. (Image by David Mark)

My most recent trip might have gone better with more thorough planning.

I could have purchased a cooler and filled it with sliced vegetables and other healthy snacks.

I could have done my final errands earlier in the week so that I wouldn’t have been hitting the road along with the other weekend travelers, getting myself stuck in a long traffic jam behind a jackknifed tractor-trailer truck.

I could have avoided traveling on a holiday weekend in the first place.

I can second-guess every decision I made and find a better one. I could call that regret, but I prefer to call it learning.

Planning takes time, and avoiding mistakes takes lots of energy. At a certain point, I chose action. I knew it wasn’t going to be perfect, but I could make it work.

This trade-off between planning and action is necessary because doing something in the best way possible is an illusion. Where you save time, you spend money. Where you save money, you spend time. Thinking ahead takes you out of the present moment, and spending time only in the present moment narrows your possible choices.

We can seek to balance these extremes in a way that feels right to us, but that doesn’t mean we can find absolute comfort. We can never predict the outcome of a complex undertaking. We can never find the true “best way.” We might just have to experiment, based on our best guess, and then evaluate. If we never plan, we have no data to evaluate—we’re just a pinball in the machine, bouncing off of everything. But if we never make it to the action stage, we won’t have any data either. No matter our preferences, we might still have to stretch a bit.

There are lots of people out there selling formulas and frameworks for things like marketing, diet and exercise, child-rearing, and starting a business. Though this expert advice is helpful, there always comes a time when you will have to test these ideas in the real world, using your own unique perspective. If you hold out to find the absolute best way and the perfect right answer, you’ll never get anywhere.

Ironically, “the best way” is to try things based on the best information you have, and then adjust based on what you observe. This method feels flimsy and imprecise at times, and you might spend as much time messing up as you do getting it “right.” But you can gain just as much from the mistakes as you do from the successes.

Sometimes, on a particularly challenging project, it feels like we’re going in circles. But that’s only part of the story. The circle is really a spiral upward. We revisit our previous thinking and see something new. We try again with more information and see a little glimmer of progress. The cycle repeats, and we get closer to our destination.

I can look back at my past and say that I should have done this or that differently. But the only reason I know that now is because I did what I did and learned from it, even if that learning was guided by an expert. Whether or not I was grateful for the lesson at the time, I’m grateful for it now, and this wisdom fuels both my planning and my actions. Instead of constantly looking for the best way, I trust that whatever I have now is the best I can do. If I pay attention, it will keep getting better. I can work with that.