It enables you to taste the climb, while resting with a look back and a look forward. As a boy, I used to go to Yosemite with my parents, and we would climb for a few hours at a time up the long sloping trail of one mountain or another, where we would stop from time to time and sit on granite boulders by the side of the trail, look out over the valley, taste the cool fresh air, and listen to the waterfalls off in the distance. Those moments of looking back and looking forward. Those sweet, lazy moments in which our plan was in the process of being realized while being realized, all at the very same moment. The Business Plan That Always Works must allow for those precious, sweet moments, those continuous Frames of Reference, because without them there is just the incessant climbing, the reaching for the top, the obsession that comes from an impatient thought, the drive to reach a conclusion.
Most plans are like that.
They drive us, but they don't renew us. They compel us, but they don't reward us. Such plans may move us forward, but every part of our body ends up resisting the movement even while obeying its dictate. Rule number six says that the plans we create reflect the life we live rather than the life we want to live. This may seem like the opposite of everything I've been saying up to now, but in fact it is not.