I recently had a mini renovation done to my kitchen.
It was supposed to take 5 days.
New flooring. New backsplash. Some cabinet work. Simple enough.
Three weeks later, I was still eating takeout on a folding table.
Electrical issues. Somehow HVAC problems? One thing after another. The end date kept moving, and my contractor kept confidently giving me an updated timeline.
It didn't hold either.
Sound familiar?
Because before I roast my contractor, I have to be honest with you — and with myself.
We do this constantly as healthcare workers.
We take one CE course on implants and expect to be placing them flawlessly within a few months.
We walk across the stage at dental school with a diploma in hand, fully convinced the career we imagined is about to materialize. We finish residency and think the hard part is over.
There is no bigger optimism bias than the week after a great CE course.
Or after graduation day.
You are on top of the world. The timeline in your head looks clean, fast, achievable.
Then reality hits. Life hits.
The actual project — the one that requires years of reps, failed cases, awkward patient conversations, and unglamorous grinding — hits.
This phenomenon has a name.
It's called the planning fallacy.
It’s our tendency to underestimate how long something will take, how much it'll cost, and how much can go wrong, while overestimating how smoothly things will go.
The root cause is almost always the same:
Optimism bias.
We plan from the best-case version of events. Not because we're naive — because the brain is wired to imagine the steps, not the chaos between them.
The planning fallacy isn't a character flaw. It's a feature of how humans think about the future.
The fix isn't to stop being optimistic. It's to stop confusing optimism with a plan.
My contractor needed buffer time built into his estimate.
We need the same thing — in our career, our finances, our life design.
The dentist who gives themselves 18 months to get comfortable with a new skill, instead of 6, will still outpace the one who quits in month 3 because they weren't an expert yet.
Expect the electrical issues. Expect the HVAC problem.
Plan for the gap — because the gap is where the actual work happens.
💊 This Week's Prescription
Where are you working off an optimistic timeline?
Double it. Then actually start.
— Dr. Mike