Free will does not refute causality

In one of the recent podcasts, Sam Harris offered his example about learning Mandarin—independent of your belief in free will and its definition, you will not become a fluent speaker unless you are putting in hours to study. Somehow, when thinking about physical laws applied to the "material" world, we expect them to be predictive of the perceived reality. Yet when it comes to dissecting the free will dilemma, we collapse to solving compatibility problems. And while it seems evident that you will not learn a language without actually learning it, we might think that some smaller or, on the opposite, more abstract goals are intertwined with the existence of the free will. However, going through the spectrum of the desired outcomes, we can still observe associations with actions taken. This leads to the only possible solution in light of the unsolved free will question—construct and update causal maps and ensure we are following our goal.