My wife is a master planner.
I am opening with that line for two reasons. One, I just like saying “my wife” out loud–both in my normal voice and my Borat impersonation. I got married exactly one month ago and there’s still a sweet and hopeful ring to that phrase. Though, I’m sure it will soon fade into the dreadful and hopeless realization that marriage is “for the rest of my natural life”—as my father-in-law likes to remind me. Secondly, she really is a master planner. What are we going to eat this week? Noa has a plan. What chores do we have to do every day? Noa has a plan. What time are we waking up next Wednesday to go to the gym? Noa has a plan.
When we first started living together in the summer of 2020, it was a collision of worlds. Noa was precise, calculated, tidy. And I… well I was a dude in his early 20s, also known as a complete disaster. I am certain I drove her mad. But it didn’t take long before I too became a victim of my own disasterness.
Growing up, I only knew one thing: I wanted to be a professional athlete. That was it. That was my only plan. Everything else in my life was up in the air. I was a go-with-the-flow kind of guy. I worked my ass off on the field. But off the field, I was passive–a bit too careless for my own good. So when I entered the real world after deciding to no longer pursue my dream of being the next David Beckham, life hit me hard.
During the first year living with Noa, my life wasn’t exactly falling apart, but it did feel like it was. I had a decent job with a decent income. I had just discovered rock climbing and was completely infatuated with it. Nothing particularly horrible had happened to me–if you exclude the global pandemic–and yet I was constantly feeling like I was in a spiral, like I couldn’t control anything and life was spinning all around me.
Pretty soon, I found myself trapped in the worst headspace I had ever been in, as if I was unable to escape some vast desert but the desert was my own negativity. It’s hard to put into words what I was feeling every day but stressed, distressed, and depressed do a pretty good job–and they sort of rhyme so that’s nice. Looking back, I’m a little embarrassed that I felt this way and couldn’t get myself out of the mental rut–but that’s just a testament to how much I’ve improved since.
I won’t go into some long exegesis about what was causing my mental decline. The point is: I was not doing well. And, I’m sure I wasn’t the only one having a slow breakdown. Hell, it was the end of 2020. We had all just collectively watched the world fall apart and it wasn’t going to get better for a while.
Anyway, at a certain point, I realized this train was headed off the tracks. So I swallowed the old big-boys-don’t-cry pride and scheduled an appointment with a mental health counselor. I don’t remember anything from my first session, except one thing. The therapist gave me a homework assignment.
“Every day before bed,” she said, “take out a pen and paper and write down your schedule for the next day.”
Over the next few months, the therapist and I spent months unpacking and reframing my many mental roadblocks. But if that first session had been the only one I ever did, my therapist’s one piece of advice–”write down your schedule”–would’ve been enough to keep the train on the tracks.
You might be reading this and thinking, Wow, you didn’t even have so much as a daily schedule? Well, it pains me to say it, but no, I had essentially no plan and no structure in my life up until that point. I had never seen the inside of a planner or a calendar in my life. How I graduated high school, even college, is beyond me.
The effect of keeping a daily schedule was twofold. First, I was able to get all of my to-dos and all of my tasks out of my head and onto paper. It was a quick and effective decluttering of the mind. Secondly, it was a firsthand introduction to the power of a good plan.
I quickly realized what Noa had known all along: if I wanted to move forward, or upward, in my life, I had to build structure. I went from keeping daily schedules, to monthly and yearly calendars, to writing 12-week workout plans, to writing down 5-year career goals. I was by no means a master planner, but I was starting to build the foundation for progress.
My wife’s tidiness, organization, and methodical nature have a magical way of casting a net around uncertainty and pulling it into the light. I have always admired her ability to address any obstacle–whether it be emotional, social, or financial–with a well-thought-out plan.
Of course, you can never truly tame uncertainty. Unexpected events will always come up. But, a good plan illuminates your path forward and gives you a sense of control. And control is key. It’s what I was missing in 2020 when I started to spiral downward. Now, I’m still no master planner, but I do have solid structures in place, solid plans, that I can refer to whenever I find myself deviating from the course. Not only has planning helped me achieve a general sense of calm, but it has also helped me make immense progress in many areas of my life.
Progress doesn’t happen passively. It happens with a plan.
This proverb was as clear to me as ever this week. When we got back from our honeymoon, Noa didn’t waste a second.
“We need to sit down and plan our future,” she said a few minutes after we opened the door into our new life as a married couple.
On Monday night, we met at a bar for happy hour after work. As I sipped on a mezcal cocktail (one of my favorite liquors), Noa and I whipped out a laptop and started creating spreadsheets with plans for our fitness, financial, and marriage goals. Luckily all three of these categories are pretty much aligned for both of us and so we built a plan for progress together.
24-year-old me would’ve revolted at the idea of creating a spreadsheet. But, thanks to my wife and a good therapist, I now understand the power of a good plan. Before I put a bow on this essay, let’s take a look at the fitness category–since I always like to tie my writing into a lesson on performance.
During my first two years of climbing, I essentially reverted to my old passivity. I didn’t have much of a training plan, other than I would climb two to three times per week. This is a great approach if you’re new to climbing: just enjoy yourself. But, if you really want to make progress, you need a structured approach. So at the beginning of this year, I spent some time putting together what I called my 3-month “grade jump” training plan. Grade jump just means my goal was to be able to climb routes that were a grade harder than I could climb at the time. After completing the three months and then some, I felt stronger than ever and was starting to consistently climb at my desired grade. But still, my training plan was loose. It wasn’t specific enough.
So, Noa and I spent a big chunk of our happy hour, writing a better training plan. Now that my wife, the master planner, is involved, we know what days we are doing cardio, what days we are doing finger strength training, what days we are doing pull-ups, and even what days we are working on aerobic and anaerobic fitness.
After just a week of this new plan, not only are we already seeing progress, but we are also feeling more confident than ever. That’s the power of a good plan.
So if you want to make progress and feel good while doing it, you need to have a plan–or at least marry someone that does.
Very practical advice. Love it
I've missed this blog!! We need a follow up post someday talking about how to plan effectively- my issue is that I always make plans that are too elaborate for my level of discipline. I also find it hard to get back on track after life happens and I fall off momentarily. So this time when putting together a climbing plan, my focus was to really keep it as simple, efficient, and realistic as possible. The goal is to be consistent till the end of the year and then go crush Hueco :)