"Pre-mortems reveal obstacles before they derail you Based on psychologist Gabriel Oettingen's WOOP research, the speaker recommends imagining the future in which you failed and asking: 'What are the top three reasons why it didn't work?' For his fat-loss plan, those turned out to be exceeding his calorie limit, losing muscle from insufficient protein, and not hitting 10,000 steps — each of which he then pre-solved with a concrete countermeasure like MyFitnessPal tracking and a walking treadmill for Zoom calls. He calls this 'mental forecasting — predicting what obstacles you're going to run into before getting started.' Spending one minute on this exercise before launch converts vague anxiety about failure into a specific mitigation checklist. Source: Ali Abdaal, Ali Abdaal YouTube, How to Actually Achieve Your Goals — The GPS System"