Stick To The Plan, or Switch it Up?

In his book “How Will You Measure Your Life?” the author and Harvard professor Clayton M. Christensen writes about life, and careers.

He says, whether we are aware of it or not, we are constantly navigating a path between our “deliberate strategies” and “unanticipated alternatives.”

Admit it. You had a deliberate plan for life that went haywire.

Like that Bowling For Soup song “1985,” about a woman named Debbie who had a plan to be famous.

But now? She has an average life, a CPA husband, a yellow SUV.

And she yearns for 1985 the way I yearn for 2014, when I was a senior year in high school.

Neither is better or worse; some people had plans that they stuck to, and it worked.

Other people found alternatives unexpectedly, and it still worked.

As Christensen writes of deliberate strategies and unanticipated alternatives in his book:

“strategy is made up of these two disparate elements, and your circumstances dictate which approach is best.”

Your career is going to constantly present you with options to stay the course you had since sitting in your high school auditorium, or jump ship for another plan that you figure out later in life.

(Like many books, this book is available on Amazon)