Even though you realize that most of your previous endeavors were overly optimistic, you believe in all seriousness that, today, the same workload – or more – is eminently doable. Daniel Kahneman calls this the planning fallacy.

We generally overestimate our capabilities so that we think that we can perform lots of work in a stipulated time frame. This fallacy leads to being liberal with a time target, and cost budget to fulfill projects in organizations. But later on, this will need to revise further. Sometimes, constant planning keeps us away from thinking about any unexpected events to occur. We need to spare good time for thinking about the occurrence of an unexpected event.

Business – When forecasting the outcomes of risky projects, executives too easily fall victim to the planning fallacy. In its grip, they make decisions based on delusional optimism rather than on a rational weighting of gains, losses, and probabilities. They overestimate benefits and underestimate costs. They spin scenarios of success while overlooking the potential for mistakes and miscalculations. As a result, they pursue initiatives that are unlikely to come in on budget or on time or to deliver the expected returns—or even to be completed.

Investment – Similar happens while we plan our investment journey, we overestimate the results of what we have planned and ignore the costs, and uncertainty associated with it. When we plan an investment, we think that the investment will perform similarly to what we planned. But we forget that there can be a black swan event which can hurt our planning. So that we should not close our eyes from occurring of black swan events while making planning.

This entire series will be reviewed with various examples from books which are “Thinking, Fast and Slow” and “The Art of Thinking Clearly“.