To plan or not to plan, that is the question.

Let’s watch some numbers:

16: The number of alarms I have per day. Each one reminds me of the deadline for the most important activities I have.
8: The exact number of activities I do between opening my eyes and going out to the gym every morning. If I miss one, or add another, the schedule and time won’t fit anymore.
4: The number of vacations missed due to the Coronavirus Pandemic in 2020.
2: The number of canceled flights.
1: The most important and specially planned goal: Travel to Scottland.
Zero: The rate of success of my goal.

With these, I just wanted to show how much I love plans and the sad results of Covid around them.

Planning is something that isn’t commonly intrinsic to a person. Nowadays, an uncountable number of techniques, studies, and tools are widely spread and used across the world to help companies to organize activities and follow up them correctly to achieve their goals, becoming something that has overstepped the business world into people’s lives and be the core value for successful people.

To have in your resume experience or skills related with “planning and control” is desirable and professionals often specialize in the area helping companies to plan almost everything. There are plans for the good times, for emergencies, to mitigate risks, and so on. Also, successful people like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, or Ellon Musk share the common characteristic to have a very organized and structured routine and a bunch of plans and objectives as well.

However, what do you do when despite your contingency plans happens the unthinkable? When not even in the worst-case scenario the world just got paralyzed and you are not prepared?. And take this idea to your life, What do you do if everything is an unpredictable and messy mess? What do you do when you do not have a plan?

Something easy to say but incredibly hard to practice: We must do the best with the things that are in our power, and take the rest as destiny presents them.

It is ok to feel frustrated, sad, angry, stressed, pissed or whatever you want to feel, what is not ok is to become stagnant. Relax, because there is always an answer to the darkest times.

With the risk of overreacting with an example, I would like to compare death with failed plans:

Everyone knows that the most certain thing in the universe is death, and with death comes the end. You don’t know when it is going to happen but it definitely will. Everyday people die and the others are a little closer to death, however, the majority of the population (some exceptions apply) don’t decide to stop living, they just keep moving forward one day at a time.

On the other hand, even the most perfect project in the world doesn’t have a 100% certainty of success, there’s always a margin to failure but it will never be as big as certain as death. But to fail isn’t the end of everything, you have the opportunity to fix the mess and keep trying, or to start over with another plan.

So, why do we bother so much when our plans don’t work? Is maybe a need to control every situation? Or is the hidden fear to improvise in unknown situations? It is impossible to define but the key behind everything is to learn how to balance correctly to have plans with the lack of them.

I have discovered that this “go with the flow” thing isn’t only a state of mind, or a quote used to feel relaxed in situations of stress, it is a skill just as powerful and important as resilience, commitment, or responsibility. Being able to keep moving forward without breaking into pieces despite the cancelation of your plans and the constant and unpredictable changes show something more than strength, it proves what you’re made of, your willpower to remain steady, it is an exercise to your mind and soul to learn how to be stoic, balanced and a believer that in the overall everything is going to be fine.

“Stoicism is not about suppressing or hiding emotions, it is about acknowledging our emotions, reflecting on what triggers them, and redirecting them for our own good. It is also about being clear about what is and what is not under our control, focusing our efforts on the first thing and not wasting them on the second. It is about practicing virtue and excellence, and traveling through the world maximizing our capabilities, while being aware of the moral dimension of all our actions”.

How to be stoic — Massimo Pigliucci