Usually I like to plan, but sometimes it is nice to just stumble from opportunity to opportunity and see where the conversation/book/situation takes me.
Sometimes we think we can plan our way to success, and part of success is planning, but a lot of success is being ready, willing, and able to act when the right opportunity arrives (or even better be ready, willing, and able to generate the right opportunity at the right time).
When your happen to run into the right person in the elevator or hallway, have the conversation you’ve been trying to plan .
Use the time you have just before a meeting to pop in for a quick conversation with a key teammate.
Allow yourself a chance to turn a negative intrusion into your planned evening (like a quick trip to urgent care with my daughter to diagnose an ear infection) into a positive evening (like a dinner out, just mom and daughter. Best quote of the night: “I loved our dinner tonight, Mom.”).
When your loyal reader doesn’t send you his invincible picture you planned to use as your Tuesday night blog post: improvise! (Come on, Tom. I want that picture!)
To summarize: Stumbling is okay.
Plan what you must, but enjoy the stumbling when you can.
Why not try?
This made me think of a book I want to read that I bought a few months ago. It’s called “Life Interrupted…Navigating the Unexpected” by Priscilla Shrier. Although I have yet to read her book, I think of the title everytime there is a change in what I had planned for my day.