Leaning too far forward…

Welcome to Pittsburgh, the start of my 11-day voyage down the Ohio River to Saint Louis. As the guest speaker aboard a river cruise ship, I’ve planned for the presentations I’ll give, the adapters and cords I’ll need, the slides, the pictures, the music etc. I have also planned and packed for the weather we’ll encounter in 9 cities, 6 states and 2 time zones. The best weather forecasters in the world have predicted sunny and dry skies with temperatures right in the flannel-layered numbers of Autumn.

So, I’m bothered by the fact that I’m trudging through puddles as rain falls heavily from grey skies maintaining a temperature scheduled for multi-layered garments of Winter.

I had planned. I had captured the temps and zero humidity on my master planning sheet for each of the 10 days on the trip.

The one day I failed to plan for was day one.

I had planned so far into the future that I missed the present.

This is not to say I’m anti-planning, quite the opposite. I’m a big planner and believer in goal setting and goal pursuing. It provides us a certain accountability to ourselves and a measuring stick of what we’re setting out to do. It also invokes the life skills of persistence, vision and tenacity.

And while it’s rare that plans survive first contact with the enemy, plans still have utility. 

The timing is apropos to quote a book I’m currently reading: “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” by Chip and Dan Heath.

“The planning process forces people to think through the right issues.” But to script every detail would be like “writing instructions for a friend to play chess on your behalf. You know a lot about the rules of the game, and you may know a lot about your friend and the opponent. But if you try to write move-by-move instructions you’ll fail. You can’t possibly foresee more than a few moves.”

I’ll make one important addition. We have to remember to include that first move in our plan. 

We used to say that if you lean too far forward, you’re just bent over.  Irreverent? Yes. Accurate? Kind of. Poetic irreverence … just my type.

Planning too far down the Ohio River left me in the rain in Pittsburgh. 

Rainy days or clear skies, I learned my lesson.

My plan is that you will too!