Surprise! Don’t crush your life in obedience to your original plan.
- Vicent Nemeyimana
- January 15, 2015
- Motivation and Inspiration
It is a common recipe for success that we have to be strong and stand against all the forces that try to push us away from original plan. Actually, many great authors including Napoleon Hill and Leroy BrownLow emphasize the value of persistence in achieving our plans or dreams. While this is the truth behind success, there is a lot of danger in any principle if common sense is not applied or say conscience and that is my concern today.
At times, you will have to change your plans and move onto a new route and still find peace and success.
When I left home for job searching in the beginnings of the year of 2014, my original plan was to work in Mbarara and even settle there if everything went well. However, as you know, I didn’t get my first job in Mbarara but Ibanda.
For those who read my articles, we agreed that patience is simply waiting while doing something else. Also we have agreed in the article, the world waits for your orders, that we need to know exactly what we want and keep pressing for that and try to ignore any deliveries that don’t match our orders. These two recipes look as if they are contradicting (ie one encouraging us to embrace change and the other encouraging us to stick to what we want). And today, I will illustrate the relationship between these principles.
Life is dynamic and we should change with it if we are to be happy. You see, when I went to Ibanda for job, I didn’t forget my dream of working in Mbarara and I indeed achieved it and worked there. However, as circumstances changed, I changed my whole dream and plan and shifted to Kampala and life is even better than it was in both Ibanda and Mbarara.
The truth is that we have to persist and stick onto our original plan but have a common sense of understanding when we are going beyond persistence and just being stubborn. Life could be having better things to offer than what we actually planned.
What am I saying?
If you have a plan to achieve, stick to it. But before it can come to pass, embrace those small daily achievements that work as your push and motivation towards your big plan and, in the process, if something much better and bigger than your original plan shows up, then go for that.
You are not a robot, just assess situations and change your targets accordingly. Okay, I think we can make it clear this way: Your life goal should not be changed but your plans should be changed and many times if demanded. For example, if my life goal is to enjoy life to the fullest and having good relationship with my God and people, I should enjoy the thousands of ways available to achieve this. And that calls for our flexibility.
There is a great difference between persistence and stubbornness. When we become stubborn, we stick onto a hopeless closed door because of our illusions and fake belief that there is nothing better than what we yearn for. When we persist, we stick onto a closed door but with hopeful signs of opening up someday.
But to do this differentiation will need your innermost being, conscience and common sense which a robot doesn’t have. A greater scholar wrote and said, “When one door closes, a thousand more doors open. It is, however, unfortunate that we keep our eyes fixed onto the closed door instead of turning and observe the new open doors”.
The above is great knowledge and it really takes a heart with conscience to discern between these closed and open doors. Considering the specific situation you could be in, you can easily tell when to let go or hold on, but the general wisdom to do this is provided by none but God. And it’s important to note here that God accomplishes that through various ways (a personal assistant or counsellor can help you with this depending on your situation).
So what is happening in your life? Are you crushing your happiness and joy just in obedience to your original plan (s)?
It is true when we visit a supermarket without a budget and plan of what we want we shall end up buying whatever is presented to us and which may not be necessary but it is also possible that we could land on something much better than what we had planned to buy. After all, we may not know exactly all that is available in the market till we move around in it. The same principle applies to life: We plan for what we wanna achieve but, at times, life might be having much more to offer than actually what we planned for.
I will not address the instance of when life has little to offer than what
we planned for because it may be hard for you and thus I will make a detailed article about this if you request me to.
However, simply, it is better to measure life in quality than quantity and if is taken up, then it is safe to admit that life can never offer less than what you ordered for (this is philosophically complex for it involves theology).
Read this: Everything Happens for the good of those who love God
In other words, life is there to respect our orders and make changes only if these changes are for our better. The fact remains that it needs a good heart with perfect discernment to understand these principles. For example, you may have planned to achieve 20 million shillings this year and you end up achieving only 12 million shillings. The two things out of this could be that you misbehaved with your plans and failed or you did your part and life effected the changes for your good. This may not be easy to understand for everyone but it is simple if you define life by quality not by quantity.
Finally, stop running your life on a fixed plan and lose pleasure, joy and happiness in pursuit of illusion dreams and plans. Learn how to embrace changes and move on to a better and quality life.
Working according to the plan and always is for robots not humans. Remember, this article doesn’t devalue planning, it qualifies it. We need to plan and observe changes in our plans as they come. Not planning at all is dangerous because you won’t even understand the changes (after all you don’t have the original), when to resist or accept them.
