When the Plan Falls Apart
Imagine you have spent days preparing for something you care about. You have thought through every detail, made your plans, rehearsed what you need to do, and invested time and effort into making it work. And then, at the last moment, the plan falls apart.
The project gets cancelled. The presentation is called off. Someone changes their mind. Circumstances shift. All the preparation that went into it suddenly seems to have been for nothing.
This happens more frequently than we think. Yet we can never quite prepare ourselves to handle such eventualities. The reason we hate this more than anything is because we believe all our preparation must culminate in a legitimate effort that gets validated and produces the outcome we desire.
When our plans fail, we see them as a wasted opportunity that could have taken us closer to the outcome. As if the practice, the planning, and the thought behind it have only one purpose: to lead us towards the ultimate outcome.
At the risk of repeating myself, thinking about the outcome is bound to lead you towards unhappiness because most of our efforts, anyway, result in failure. That’s why we look for culprits.
Stop accounting for every action in your life. Do it because it was the most meaningful thing to do in that moment. We can never prepare for the future; we can only plan for today based on the insight available to us.
The next time your plan gets cancelled, think about the time you spent doing things you otherwise would never have done. Think about the ways you learned to do certain things well. And sometimes, the opportunity itself is the outcome.