A map gives equal space to roads that feel very different under your feet.

Representation flattens what it represents, and that is what makes it usable. Two centimetres of paper can be a shaded lane or a mile of uphill beside lorries, and the map has no way of saying so, because saying so would make it a different kind of document. The abstraction is genuinely useful. It is simply not the ground.

When you plan from any flattened version of a thing, a schedule, a budget, a list of tasks, ask someone who has been through it what the hard part actually was. Then build in room for that. The distances are right; the difficulty is nowhere on the page.