“Failing to plan is planning to fail.”

Photo by John T on Unsplash

My guess is that you have more than likely heard this quote at some point in your life. Your parents may have said it. You might have had a teacher or coach say it to you at some point in your school career, especially if you came into a class or a game unprepared for what was happening. We have often attributed this quote to the likes of Ben Franklin, John Wooden, military leaders, pastors, and more. We aren’t quite sure who said it first or its original context. Still, it has been shared numerous times throughout history as a way of encouraging and reminding us to have a plan ready to help us launch towards success.

Regardless of which method you choose to start your new year, whether resolutions, goals, habits, a word, etc.… (you can read more about that here) and I hope you have an idea. Any self-respecting trainer, coach, accountability partner, or self-help book is going to encourage you to plan how you are going to implement the change you want. And you need one. It’s important. You have to be able to track how you are doing and have something in place to help you on your journey. However, I believe it establishes a false dichotomy when we use that quote. 

I get the sense from this all-to-famous quote that as long as you have a plan in place, success is guaranteed. Failure happens when you have prepared or planned a way through. Didn’t plan to study, then there is a good chance you will fail the test. Didn’t prepare for that opponent? Be prepared to lose the game. But what happens when you create a plan, you follow through, and you fail anyway? What happens when you come into the game with a well-prepared game plan and still get beat? What then? Did you really plan or just sort of plan? Were you really prepared or only partially prepared?

Most leadership and business gurus like to remind us that we learn more from our failures than we do from our successes, and I wholeheartedly agree. Whenever I have failed, and I have taken the time to study why I have failed, I learn a great deal about myself. But it often feels like a more significant failure, when I have what I believe to be a well thought out plan ready to be executed. What if we didn’t just need a plan to help move forward but a plan that will help guide us when we fail? 

When was the last time you created a goal and thought out your plan of attack to get you towards that goal, and then you deliberately created a plan for when you fail? My guess is not too often. I know for myself, in my moments of failure, I often get spun out, and it takes some time to recover. It usually only after I have experienced a failure that I start thinking through what’s next. What if, instead of losing precious momentum and time to the failure spin-out, we already had a plan in place for what needed to happen next? 

Failure is part of life, so why not have a plan in place for when it comes? When you lose sight of your goal of losing weight and fall off the healthy eating wagon, what plan will you have to help you get back on quicker? When you have determined that this is the year, you will become more disciplined and organized, and three weeks in your office is a mess, and you have stopped implementing the new disciplines, what is your plan to get back on track? I think we lose precious time, momentum, and even success when we don’t have a plan for what happens when we fail. I can’t help but think that if we were not just to create a plan for our success but a plan for our failure that we would get to where we want to be much quicker than we might think.

So the next time you create a goal, and then you plan out how you are going to get there, be sure to include a plan for failure. Your goal is far too important to give up on, and failure is too easy of a barricade to get over if you know how you are going to move on from it. 

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