When Life Revises Our Plans

Before reading further, pause for a moment.

Where did your attention go?

Mine went first to the edits—and I laughed. Then I found myself going back through them more slowly.

Nine months ago, each of these could have sounded like a perfectly reasonable goal for a manager. Fix problems. Hold people accountable. Have answers. Optimize the team. Manage.

Then nine months of actually managing people happened.

That’s where the image became more interesting to me.

The goals weren’t abandoned. They were revised by experience.

Fixing became understanding. Accountability turned inward. Eliminating every problem became solving the one in front of us. Having answers gave way to asking better questions. Optimizing required orienting. Managing became leading.

I’ve spent enough time starting, building and leading businesses to recognize more than a little of myself in that list.

Early in our careers, many of us are rewarded for knowing things and getting things done. Sell more. Solve the problem. Hit the number. Be accountable for our own performance.

Then someone makes us a manager.

A salesperson becomes a sales manager. A receptionist becomes an office manager. A great individual contributor suddenly becomes responsible for other individual contributors.

And we tell them to manage.

Manage what, exactly?

The word itself can mean to direct, supervise or control. So it shouldn’t surprise us when a new manager begins there: directing work, supervising people, controlling outcomes, optimizing results.

Experience has a way of revising that job description.

People aren’t problems to fix. Accountability isn’t something we simply impose on others. Teams don’t always need another answer from us. And before we can optimize where we’re going, it helps to know where we are.

Perhaps that’s what I like most about revisiting goals nine months later.

We get to see what reality has taught us.

Not every January ambition needs to survive September unchanged. Some should. Others deserve to be questioned, crossed out, written over—or replaced with something we couldn’t have understood nine months earlier.

Look at the image one more time.

Where does your attention go now?

Maybe somewhere different.

That’s worth noticing.

Life has a way of revising our plans.

Plan to be surprised.

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