The Ghost of Projections

I am staring at the blue light of the monitor until my retinas feel like they’ve been scrubbed with graveyard grit, a sensation I suspect June M.-L. knows better than anyone. Outside, the sky is the color of a bruised plum, and I can see her, the cemetery groundskeeper, leaning on a rusted spade. She is 67, her back curved like a question mark, and she spends her days maintaining the only place where the plans people make actually stay put. I’ve reread the same sentence five times now. It’s a sentence in my business plan about ‘synergistic market penetration,’ and it feels like a lie I’m telling to a ghost. My spreadsheet is a masterpiece of fiction, a collection of 47 tabs that project a future so bright it’s blinding, yet here I am, sitting in a room that smells of stale coffee and unearned confidence.

I spent 37 days crafting this narrative, choosing fonts that scream ‘stability’ and ‘vision.’ But as I watch June M.-L. move a pile of damp earth, I realize that my business plan is nothing more than institutional cosplay. It is a costume I am putting on to convince banks and investors that I have a map for a territory that hasn’t even been discovered yet. It’s the corporate equivalent of a seance, trying to summon a reality that doesn’t want to be born.

The Plan Becomes a Blindfold

We are taught that the plan is the bedrock. We are told that if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. But what they don’t tell you is that the plan often becomes a blindfold. You become so enamored with the 27 percent growth you projected for the second quarter that you ignore the 7 red flags screaming from your actual customers. I remember my first business, a venture into organic textiles that I had planned down to the last $17 of marketing spend. My plan said the market wanted luxury; the market actually wanted durability. I was so busy following the script I had written that I missed the performance happening right in front of me. I was trying to force the audience to like the play, rather than changing the dialogue to suit their cheers.

The Brutal Honesty of Earth

This is the core frustration of the modern entrepreneur: the demand for certainty in an inherently uncertain universe. We are asked to provide 7-year projections when we don’t even know if the platform we’re building on will exist in 7 months. It is an exercise in absurdity. We sit in these glass-walled rooms, pretending that we can control the chaos of human desire and global supply chains with a few well-placed formulas. June M.-L. doesn’t have a 7-year plan for the cemetery. She knows that the ground shifts. She knows that a heavy rain can change the landscape of a plot in 7 minutes. She works with the earth she has, not the earth she wish she had. There is a brutal honesty in her work that my spreadsheet lacks.

Complicity in the Theater

I’ve often wondered why we cling to these documents. Perhaps it’s because the alternative-admitting we are guessing-is too terrifying. If I tell an investor that I’m going to try 7 different things and see which one doesn’t blow up, they’ll show me the door. But if I give them a 77-page PDF with color-coded graphs, they’ll give me a check. We are all complicit in this theater. We all agree to pretend that the future is a linear path rather than a tangled thicket. This is why so many startups fail; they aren’t killed by a lack of planning, but by an inability to abandon the plan when it stops making sense.

Instead of committing to 7,007 units of a product no one has smelled yet, you start with the reality of the now. You iterate. You breathe. You survive.

It took me 7 weeks to realize that the 17 people who actually bought the product were more important than the 990 people I had imagined. They liked the packaging, but they hated the scent. They wanted something that felt more like the earth and less like a laboratory.

Tending to What is Growing

If I had stuck to the plan, I would have doubled down on the original formula. I would have spent my remaining $7,007 on advertising a product that people didn’t actually want, all because the plan said that’s what I should do. Instead, I looked at June M.-L. and her pile of dirt. I realized that I needed to be a groundskeeper, not an architect. I needed to tend to what was actually growing, even if it wasn’t what I had intended to plant. I changed the scent. I simplified the label. I listened to the 17 voices instead of the 1,007 ghosts.

To survive, you have to be willing to tear up your 7-year forecast every 7 days. You have to find comfort in the pivot. Most people think pivoting is a sign of weakness, a confession that you didn’t know what you were doing. But June M.-L. knows that if you don’t move with the slope of the hill, you’re going to break your knees. The strength is in the flexibility, not the granite.

They are 27 steps ahead not because they predicted the future, but because they are paying more attention to the present than anyone else.

Character Versus Certainty

We often confuse ‘seriousness’ with ‘certainty.’ We think that if we have a detailed plan, we are being professional. But true professionalism is the ability to navigate through the fog without losing your cool. It’s knowing that you have $707 in the bank and a vision that is 7 days away from collapsing, and still making the right call for the long term. It’s about character, not charts.

We were wrong about everything, and that was the best thing that ever happened to us. It forced us to learn.

Closing the Cage

I’m going to close this spreadsheet now. The blue light is making my eyes ache, and the 47 tabs are starting to look like a cage. I’ll ask her how she handles the days when the ground is too hard to dig. She doesn’t consult a 7-year forecast. She just looks at the dirt.

Is there a version of your life where you aren’t trying to outrun the ghost of your own expectations?