The Imperfect Plan

Start with what is already in your pocket. Use it. Learn it.Make it better. Then upgrade when you actually need to.

For years, I carried around a camera that I hated. Not literally hated. It was a beautiful camera. A proper DSLR. Excellent glass, excellent image quality, excellent everything. It was also large, heavy and irritating.

But it took beautiful photographs. So I carried it. I carried it to restaurants. I carried it to events. I carried it while travelling. I carried it because somewhere in my head I had decided that if I was going to take good photographs, I needed a good camera. And the camera delivered. When I actually used it. Which was the problem.

There were plenty of moments when I saw something worth photographing, thought about taking the camera out, looked at the bag, looked at the scene and decided that setting everything up was just too much effort. The perfect camera was sitting three feet away from me. And I didn't take the photograph. Eventually I upgraded to a mirrorless camera. Smaller. Lighter. Easier to carry. An improvement. But still a camera. There was still a process. Take it out. Turn it on. Compose. Adjust. Wait. Shoot.

And then came Rome. I was carrying the camera around, taking photographs, and increasingly getting annoyed with the fact that I was carrying the camera around.

When I had to take a train to Venice, I left the camera behind. Not intentionally, but I forgot the bag in my hotel. I only had my phone. That's it. No DSLR. No mirrorless. No lenses. No bag full of equipment. Just the phone that was already in my pocket.

And something rather interesting happened. I took photographs. Lots of them. I took photographs because I didn't have to decide whether the photograph was worth the effort of getting the camera out. I didn't have to wait for the perfect light. I didn't have to set up the perfect composition.

I saw something. I took a photograph.

Sometimes it was terrible. Sometimes it was surprisingly good. But I had something that was far more important than technical perfection. I had the photograph.

And then I started figuring out what the phone could actually do. Portrait mode. Exposure. Focus. Angles. Light. Composition. Editing. When to use the wide lens. When not to use it. How to shoot through glass. How to use shadows. The camera wasn't getting better.I was getting better at using what I had. And eventually I realised something that should have been obvious much earlier: The best camera isn't necessarily the best camera. The best camera is the one you have with you. And more importantly, it is the one you know how to use.

This has almost nothing to do with photography

I've been thinking about this a lot in the context of health and longevity. Because we do something rather strange in medicine. We are very good at designing perfect plans. The perfect diet. The perfect exercise programme. The perfect sleep schedule. The perfect supplement stack. The perfect fasting window. The perfect morning routine.

The perfect seven-step longevity protocol that begins at 5:12 a.m. and somehow requires you to have the discipline of a monk and the free time of someone who has recently retired. On paper, it looks fantastic. And then Monday happens. You have work. The children need something. A meeting runs late. You have to travel. Someone orders biriyani. You slept badly. You don't have 90 minutes to exercise.

And suddenly your perfect plan becomes completely useless. Not because the science was wrong. Because the plan wasn't designed for your actual life. That's a very different problem.

The best exercise programme is not the one with the most exercises

Imagine I design a brilliant exercise programme for you. Four days of resistance training. Two Zone 2 sessions. One interval session.

Mobility every day. Balance twice a week. Progressive overload. Heart-rate targets. Recovery periods. Perfect. And you do it for six days.Then you miss one session. Then another. Then work gets busy.

Three weeks later, the programme is sitting on your phone looking increasingly judgmental. Meanwhile, someone else is doing 25 minutes of brisk walking every day because that's what fits into their life. Who has the better programme? On paper? Probably yours. In reality?

We don't know yet. Because the outcome isn't determined by the quality of the programme sitting inside the PDF. It is determined by the programme that gets performed repeatedly. That distinction is incredibly important.

Friction is the enemy we don't talk about enough

We tend to think behaviour change is about motivation. It often isn't. It is about friction. Every additional step between intention and action creates an opportunity to abandon the action. If your gym is 45 minutes away, going to the gym requires a decision. If your exercise clothes are already laid out and you have a few exercises you can do at home, there is less friction.

If your healthy food requires an elaborate recipe with seventeen ingredients, you have created friction. If your default meal is something simple that you can assemble in five minutes, you've reduced it. If meditation requires an app, headphones, candles, a special cushion and the correct lunar phase, you have probably made it harder than it needs to be. The body doesn't care how aesthetically pleasing your wellness routine looks. It cares about what you actually do. And this is why I increasingly believe that friction should be treated as a clinical variable.

Not just:

“What should this person do?”

But:

“What can this person realistically keep doing?”

The imperfect plan wins by repetition

There is something deeply unsexy about this. Walking isn't particularly sexy. Twenty minutes of resistance training isn't particularly sexy. Going to bed at a reasonable time isn't sexy. Eating a reasonably good breakfast isn't sexy. Doing ten minutes of mobility because that's all you have time for isn't going to get you a sponsorship from a fitness brand. But these things compound. And that's the bit we sometimes forget when we talk about longevity.

Longevity is not one heroic intervention. It is the accumulated effect of thousands of relatively ordinary decisions. Your muscle mass didn't appear because you had one amazing workout. Your cardiovascular fitness didn't appear because you did one Norwegian 4×4. Your metabolic health didn't come from one salad. And your sleep didn't improve because you bought a very expensive mattress.

The biology is responding to repeated exposure. Which means the plan that you can execute 80% of the time may beat the plan that is theoretically superior but executed 20% of the time. Not because 80% is magically better than 20%. Because 80% of something is something. Twenty percent of something often isn't enough to create the adaptation you were hoping for.

But don't use this as an excuse

There is an important caveat here. “Do what you can” can very easily become “do whatever is comfortable.” That's not what I'm saying. My phone camera didn't become good because I decided that photography didn't matter. I became better at using it. I learned its limitations. I learned its strengths. I changed my technique.

I figured out how to get more out of the equipment I had. And eventually, I could produce photographs that were perfectly adequate for what I actually needed them for. That distinction matters.

The imperfect plan is not the lazy plan.

It is the plan designed around reality. And once it is working, you can improve it. Start with walking. Then add resistance training. Then improve the quality. Then add intensity. Start by fixing breakfast. Then improve protein. Then improve fibre. Then work on the overall dietary pattern. Start by getting seven hours of sleep consistently. Then worry about whether your bedroom is 18°C or 19°C. You don't have to install the entire operating system on day one.

There is also a question of purpose

This is where my camera story really changed my thinking. Was the DSLR technically better? Absolutely. Was the mirrorless better than the phone? In many circumstances, yes. But what was I actually trying to do? I wasn't shooting for National Geographic. I wasn't producing photographs for a museum exhibition. I wasn't being paid to photograph a celebrity. I was taking photographs for my blog.

I wanted to document places, food, people and experiences. For that purpose, the phone was good enough. And once I stopped worrying about whether it was the best camera and started learning how to use it, it became extraordinarily useful.

Health is exactly the same. You don't need the world's most sophisticated longevity programme. You need the programme that is appropriate for your goal, your biology and your life. A professional athlete needs a different training programme from a 55-year-old executive who sits for nine hours a day. Someone with insulin resistance needs a different dietary strategy from someone metabolically healthy. Someone sleeping five hours needs to solve a different problem from someone sleeping eight. Someone who travels three weeks a month cannot have the same routine as someone who works from home.

Context matters.

The longevity equivalent of the phone in my pocket

Perhaps this is why I am increasingly suspicious of complicated health plans. Not because complexity is inherently bad. Sometimes medicine is complicated because biology is complicated. But complexity should earn its place. If adding another intervention makes the plan harder to follow without meaningfully improving the outcome, why are we doing it? If your supplement stack requires a spreadsheet to remember, perhaps the first intervention should be simplifying it. If your exercise programme requires two hours a day, perhaps we should first figure out what you can do in 30 minutes. If your diet works beautifully when you're at home but collapses every time you travel, perhaps the next step isn't a stricter diet.

Perhaps it is a travel version of your diet. You need the equivalent of the phone camera. Something that is always available. Something you know how to use. Something that works when conditions aren't perfect. Because life is rarely perfect This, ultimately, is what longevity medicine has to contend with. Not the perfect patient. The actual human being.The person who travels. The person who has meetings. The person who has children. The person who goes out for dinner. The person who occasionally eats too much. The person who sleeps badly. The person who gets sick. The person who has a stressful week. The person who has a brilliant week and then completely falls off the wagon on Saturday.

We don't need a plan that works only when life behaves itself. We need a plan that survives life. That is a much higher standard. And ironically, it may produce a much less impressive-looking plan. Maybe your longevity plan is simply.

The camera in your pocket

I still have cameras that are technically better than my phone. I still appreciate good lenses. And when the occasion demands it, I'll happily use them. But I don't carry them everywhere anymore. Because I've learnt something more valuable than owning better equipment. I've learnt how to get more out of what I already have. And I think there is a lesson here for health.

You don't need to wait until you have the perfect diet, the perfect gym, the perfect schedule, the perfect wearable, the perfect blood tests or the perfect supplement stack. Start with what is already in your pocket. Use it. Learn it. Make it better. Then upgrade when you actually need to. Because the perfect plan sitting unused is just an expensive DSLR in a cupboard. The imperfect plan that you execute every day?

That's the photograph you actually get to keep.

Worth Thinking About

A fortnightly essay on longevity, food, and the trade-offs nobody talks about.