The Futility of Planning

Probably the best speech in movie history (aside from John Goodman’s rant about fuck you money in The Gambler) is The Joker’s peroration to Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight.

It goes like this:

Do I really look like a guy with a plan, Harvey?

I don’t have a plan.

The mob has plans. The cops have plans.

You know what I am, Harvey? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it.

I just do things. I am just the wrench in the gears. I hate plans.

Yours, theirs, everyone’s. Maroni has plans. Gordon has plans.

Schemers trying to control their worlds.

I am not a schemer. I show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.

So when I say that you and your girlfriend was nothing personal, you know I am telling the truth.

I just did what I do best. I took your plan and turned it on itself.

Look what I have done to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets.

Nobody panics when the expected people get killed. Nobody panics when things go according to plan, even if the plan is horrifying.

If I tell the press that tomorrow a gangbanger will get shot or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics—because it’s all part of the plan.

But when I say that one little old mayor will die, everybody loses their minds.

Introduce a little anarchy, you upset the established order and everything becomes chaos.

I am agent of chaos.

And you know the thing about chaos Harvey?

“It is FAIR.”

That was one of those moments in the cinema when you’re sitting there and you’re like, you know, the bad guy is making a lot of sense. Now, I’m not going to blow up any hospitals, but I do want to talk about the futility of plans. God laughs at our plans. You want to know what I do to prepare for interviews? Nothing! Because the unplanned is better than the planned. The spontaneous is better than the rehearsed.

If you make your living in the financial markets, you are familiar with the ways of chaos. We all have plans for trades. I’m going to buy it at X and sell it at Y and make Z. How often does that work out? It has worked out precisely one time in my entire career. Shit goes sideways. You adapt, and improvise. I’m sure you know people who plan out every aspect of their lives, and correspondingly, they are not so good at adapting and improvising.

I make plans. But the plans are basically just a rough outline. A good example of this is air travel. If you are not able to adapt and improvise with air travel, you are going to be miserable. I was on a flight from Hartford to DCA a few days ago, and a toddler got some allergic reaction while we were sitting on the tarmac, waiting to take off. Back to the gate. I was going to miss my connection. Did I freak out? No, I adapted and improvised. I texted a college buddy who lived in DC and asked if I could crash at his place. As it turned out, it wasn’t necessary, because I made my connection anyway, because my connecting flight was late, too. Either way, my heart rate did not go up one bpm. I had extra clothes. I had a toothbrush. I was going to be fine. Sometimes, shit happens, which refers directly to the futility of plans.

The communists in communist countries make 100-year plans. Everyone talks about this with the Chinese. Oooh, they’re so smart, they’re thinking out 100 years. Then, a year later, the plans are totally useless. The U.S. government lurches from one crisis to another, without any clear plans. Actually, this is the correct way to do things. And besides, in a democracy, there is no continuity from administration to administration, so long-term plans are pointless. I get the impression that this is how Elon Musk manages, constantly putting out fires and dropping bombs on Twitter. It seems to work for him! Boeing, on the other hand, has plans, thinking out thirty years. Yet they cannot see the trees for the forest.

I have some plans to do things in the coming years. Like I said, they are rough outlines. I know I will encounter some challenges along the way, and then I will adapt and improvise. Things are never as easy as they seem. But you solve one problem, then another problem, then another problem. Teachers can plan, more or less. You can write up a syllabus and stick to the syllabus. In the business world, you can’t plan—it’s too dynamic of an environment. Fossil probably thought things were pretty good until the Apple Watch came along. Stock down 90%. Nobody saw that one coming. Blackberry probably thought things were pretty good until the iPhone came along. Nobody saw that one coming. All it takes is about twelve months for you to be disrupted out of existence.

In my writing, I don’t plan. I didn’t plan this piece. I figured I’d start with The Joker speech and go from there, and see where it took me. When I write short stories, I never know how they are going to end. Whenever I plan my writing, it ends up immeasurably worse. All the Evil of This World is a maddeningly complex book. There is a lot of engineering between the different overlapping storylines. You might think I would have mapped it out in a diagram ahead of time. Nope, started on page 1, went to page 2, and at the end, I had a book. The most I will ever do for a book is have a chapter outline, which I had for No Worries. I will admit to doing chapter outlines for books. But that is all the planning I will ever do. Because the unplanned is better than the planned. The spontaneous is better than the rehearsed.

This is the point in the piece where I point out that capitalism is entirely unplanned. You have a phone. Someone had to design the phone, which required chip experts and software experts and hardware experts. Manufacturing takes place somewhere around the world, with different contractors and subcontractors providing various parts for the phone. The materials for those parts were obtained from around the globe. And you know what? There is no phone czar sitting in Washington, DC orchestrating all these activities. Each person working for their own benefit, for the mutual benefit of others. Nobody had to be told what to do. That’s magic. That is the kaleidoscopic energy of capitalism. Planning an economy has been tried, and it results in chronic shortages and hardship. No one person can anticipate and organize the activities of millions of people, and the result is crushing deprivation. Because the unplanned is better than the planned. The spontaneous is better than the rehearsed.

Bloomberg was a good mayor in many respects, but he was a planner. And I suppose at Bloomberg LP, where you have all that recurring terminal revenue coming in, you have that luxury. In particular, I am thinking of the effort to reroute traffic around Times Square by cutting off Broadway and turning the entire place into a giant pedestrian walkabout. Not long after that happened, you had costumed characters and the desnudas, along with the return of crime and drug dealing. I watched a midnight showing of The Crow in Times Square in 1994 and felt safer than walking through there today in broad daylight. That’s by far the least egregious intervention in New York City that I can think of, but probably the most visible. Things are the way they are for a reason. Leave it the fuck alone.

I do not remember the details of this story, but here is a story: there was a college with a quad where students were walking back and forth to classes. The planners at the college wanted to put in an array of sidewalks to keep the kids from mucking up the grass. Wait, the college president said. After a few months, there were paths across the quad where the grass had given way to dirt. That is where they built the sidewalks. This is also known as spontaneous order.

I do not have a high opinion of TV news shows or the people who go on TV news shows, but I recognize that it is a demanding discipline that requires a great deal of flexibility. You have a one-hour program planned out, and then some drunk sets off a car bomb in Omaha. Within seconds, you are talking about Omaha. It is a dynamic environment, and the hosts have to be ready for anything. This is true of media in general: newspapers, radio, and the like. 9/11 happened on a Tuesday. Not sure if you knew this, but all book launches are on Tuesday. Some poor sap had his life’s work released the day of 9/11. The thing about chaos is that it’s fair; sometimes you just have bad luck.

I planned on doing an entire career in the Coast Guard. God laughed at my plans. I planned on doing an entire career on Wall Street. God laughed at my plans. These days, I have no idea what the hell I am going to do. I am going to do something if it works, and when it stops working, I will do something else. I think this is the right way to live.