What do you do when things don’t go as planned?

Do you panic?

Do you complain?

Do you give up?

Or do you buckle down and make a new plan?

Hardly ever have you heard of any personal or professional endeavor executed precisely as planned. In fact, more often than not, you’ll hear people say they had to correct course, improvise, or, in extreme situations, throw out the plan and create a new one.

Probably the only time you’ll experience or hear things going exactly as planned is on a production line where machines have been calibrated as tightly as possible and seldom involve human interaction.

Planning provides you with an estimation and rough roadmap that might help you achieve your goals, but planning doesn’t guarantee success.

Since things rarely go as planned, it doesn’t mean that planning is a waste of time. Planning allows you to think out loud. It enables you to think through and account for all the possible known impediments and perhaps even imagine some unknowns.

The experience of things not going as planned is not unique to you. So when things don’t go as planned, and you feel like giving up, hug yourself, say a few encouraging words, and then put your pen to paper and create a new plan.

P.S. Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed it, do me a favor and share it with one person you love.