Learn From My Mistakes

Short story of how I break life chaos into small, solvable problems - 3 min read.

If you had to guess the most complicated missions on earth, would NASA make your top 5?

With all the complexity, backups, simulations, paranoia, risk management, and committees-about-committees - for me it is number one.

It is more complicated than keeping the entire internet alive while half the planet is streaming Netflix and the other half is arguing on Reddit.

And maybe even more complicated than organizing a group chat about Christmas plans.

But if you had to guess: what percentage of a NASA spacecraft’s flight goes exactly according to plan?

You might think 70 or 80 percent.

Ha!

50%?

No? 40%?!

In reality it is closer to 2-4% (which is, obviously, why I politely declined to become an astronaut).

Most missions are basically: “Oh shit… oh shit… LAUNCH, yay!… oh shit… oh shit… ORBIT!… oh shit… oh shiiiit… SPLASHDOWN, yay!”

Technically, they are in permanent correction mode, nudging back toward the route they hoped to follow.

Tell me that does not sound like real life.

When was the last time you opened champagne on New Year’s Eve and said:
“This year turned out exactly as I planned, so here is my flawless plan for next year”?

Exactly.

But here is an interesting part.

For years, I assumed every stumble meant I had chosen badly.

If I had nailed the perfect system on day one, I could just set it up and never worry about it.

NASA and I now agree - there is no perfect system.

And there is always risk: what remains after you think you have accounted for everything.

If your plan covers only what you can imagine, reality will attack from the blind spots.

You cannot plan for what does not exist in your head yet.

The stronger your “I got this” feeling, the harder reality laughs.

Life happens. Always. Everywhere. To everyone.

The problem is not that life is messy.

The problem is that we keep expecting it to behave.

This is why we end up pissed off, upset, and unhappy.

Why?

Because we expect more than we actually get.

The gap between expectation and reality is the happiness killer.

The wider the gap - the stronger the misery.

This reminds me of a guy I met a few years ago, right in the middle of a personal circus.

Pandemic, stock market turmoil, and the terrifying risk of running out of toilet paper for weeks (I still do not know if that was a global paper problem or just a very American meltdown).

The dude was calm. Made little money. Did not seem worried about the future at all.

While we were bitching about life, he was sipping his usual Red Bull and stayed cool.

Naturally, I asked him about his grand survival plan.

He shrugged and said: “I set my expectation bar very low. Then I am pleasantly surprised every time something goes above it.”

So the rule of happiness is this: low expectations.

If you want a practical version, do this: plan your life, then assume at least 90% will be improvisation.

Therefore, my low expectation for next year is simple: it should be better than this year, but worse than the year after.

Plus, a private jet for my wife so she can commute and travel in style.

I work from home and travel emotionally.

Till next time.

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Cool Facts About Walt Disney

Paper-Route Discipline: From age 9 to about 15, Disney got up around 3:30 a.m. every day to deliver hundreds of newspapers before school and again after, building a habit of early starts, long hours, and doing boring work reliably.

Food Rules For Clear Thinking: He kept lunch light, often just simple food and vegetable juice, because he believed heavy meals made thinking fuzzy and discouraged long lunch breaks, treating food as fuel for focus, not a midday event.

Three-Mode Thinking: He effectively separated work into three modes in sequence – Dreamer for wild ideas, Realist for plans and resources, Critic for harsh review – and cycled himself and his teams through these stages so every project got vision, execution, and rigorous editing.

Plussing Instead Of Passing: Once a film was finished he called it “dead” and focused on things he could keep improving, using “plussing” as a verb that meant always adding one more improvement so the experience people got was more than they paid for.

Golf As A Time-Boxed Warmup: Some mornings he woke at 5:30, played just five holes of golf, then skipped straight to the 18th so he could get the “finished a round” feeling without burning half the day.

Studying Desks And Trash Cans: After hours he walked the studio, looking at artists’ desks, bulletin boards, and even wastebaskets to see what people were really working on and how ideas were evolving before they showed him anything.

Storyboards As Default Decision Tool: He turned storyboards into a core planning system, treating them like giant comics of a film or attraction so teams could spot pacing problems, weak scenes, and logic gaps before spending real money on production.

Long Horizon Thinking: He used vivid imagination to project the long term effects of decisions, favoring big bets like Snow White and Disneyland over small tweaks, and trained himself to think through several future paths before committing.

Designing The Office For Energy: Headquarters had a penthouse with a soda fountain, gym, showers, snack shop, and lawns for badminton and baseball, so people could recharge on-site instead of drifting away from the work. Does it remind you other companies these days?

Coffee And Pricing Defaults: He reportedly insisted coffee at Disneyland cost only a dime, using a tiny everyday item to signal fairness and keep the guest experience grounded, even while the park around it was expensive to build and run.

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