Plans give you opportunities
Photo by The Art Institute of Chicago on Unsplash
I was recently talking with a woman whose life had kind of blown up, and not in a good way. In a very short span of time, for a variety of (semi-unrelated) reasons, she walked away from a very well-paying job, got divorced, and realized her grown children weren’t quite ready to fully launch into their own independent adulthood. As you might expect, she said these circumstances have been incredibly overwhelming, and for the past few years she’s been living her life ‘one day at a time’. When I asked her what her plans were now for the future, she responded that she didn’t have one and wasn’t going to make any. She had ‘done everything right’ and felt like she didn’t end up with anything she had planned for. So why bother making plans?
Her story isn’t uncommon. When life feels unpredictable, making plans can seem naïve — even pointless. But planning isn’t only about controlling outcomes; it’s also about staying open to possibilities.
When life gets hard, or when things don’t turn out as precisely as we had envisioned, it can be really tempting to give into this ‘why bother’ mentality, and to stop setting goals for ourselves. There’s a famous quote from a Robert Burns poem that you hear when plans go off the rails, the best-laid schemes of mice and men go oft awry. People use it to justify their own belief there’s a futility to setting lofty goals in the first place. But this misses the crucial point that even if your plans go off the rails, you’re still going somewhere. You got the train out of the station. Maybe you even found a different set of tracks, one you hadn’t known about. Your actions in pursuing those plans not only deepen your skills and expertise, they also might lead to opportunities that your past self couldn’t have ever predicted.
What does this look like in practice? Let’s imagine, for instance, that you have your PhD and you’re currently doing a postdoctoral fellowship. Your plan was to go on the academic job market and secure an Assistant Professor position. But the market is tough. There aren’t a lot of jobs open now that would be a good fit. The ones you do apply to don’t result in any interviews. So, in the ensuing year, you assess where you need to improve your application and double-down on your efforts. You take a hard look at your time management and find areas where you could improve your productivity without sacrificing your mental and physical health. You work diligently on your writing craft so that you can get some more papers out, preferably at least one in a more high-profile journal. You do some outreach lectures at the library and run a workshop at your university to get more teaching experience. You’re on the job market again the following year, this time with a considerably better application. But, no job offers emerge. You’re running out of funding, and after assessing all of your options, you apply for and secure a job in government.
Now, did your plans fail? Maybe your plans to become an academic didn’t work out, but was trying to become an academic in the first place a completely worthless plan? Did you end up with ‘nothing’? Would you have been better off if you hadn’t acted on the plan at all? Of course not. Putting in the work gave you the skillsets to land a different kind of job. In fact, your writing samples and your ability to communicate complicated ideas to lay audiences were some of the standout qualities that made you the preferred candidate for the government job. And now you’re in an interesting 9-5 job with good benefits, room to grow, and weekends off. The plan may not have worked out exactly as you had imagined, but the actions you took along the way gave you options to be a competitive candidate for a range of jobs and set you up for success in a different (and perhaps even better) form.
As a different saying goes, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. You certainly can’t get where you want to go if you don’t make a plan to get there. But also remember that making a plan doesn’t guarantee a future exactly as you’ve laid it out in your mind. You can’t perfectly plan your future, but by having a plan and mindfully acting in ways that are needed to get closer to your goals, you can make sure your future self always has choices.
Making a plan isn’t about predicting the future; it’s about preparing for it. Even when life takes unexpected turns, the actions you take toward your goals create opportunities you couldn’t have imagined at the start. If you’re feeling unsure about your next steps, or how to design a plan that feels both flexible and meaningful, let’s talk. I help early-career researchers create strategic, sustainable plans that open doors and reduce burnout. Book a free discovery call, and let’s chart your next chapter together.
Next week: Everyone is messy
