When you imagine and clearly articulate your goals in writing, you access the creative energy of your right brain. Imagination and creativity allow you to find solutions to problems that were not previously available to you and give your left brain an opportunity to be receptive to new ideas.
Rarely did events play out as imagined, in any case. The order of future events was transient. In the same way that the past was reconfigured by selective memory, future events, too, were moving targets. One could only act on instinct, grab hold of an intuited perfect moment, and spring into action.