I’ve always hated this word, truth be told. I’ve tried to avoid using it for forever. The further I go into my business, and the more I speak with my wife at home about our life goals, it keeps popping up into the conversation, inevitably. This damn word: Plan. It comes up everywhere I turn these days. It’s even in some of favourite sayings, like “Failing to plan, is planning to fail.” Damn you.
I’m literally writing this from an airplane seat, en route from Barcelona to Athens (and no, I’m not in first-class). If my wife and I hadn’t have - um - planned for this trip, I wouldn’t be airborne over the Mediterranean Sea with my family. So, yes, I get the need to plan. It makes things happen. It provides purpose, and motivation, through the use of intention. I just don’t love living my life with a plan. I’ve resisted for as long as I can. Though the best things in my life took time, and a plan, to come to be what they are today.
Let me switch gears and go back in time, and maybe paint a picture of the deeper “me”. I’m really easy-going. I almost feel like a real-life Winnie the Pooh, in all fairness. I don’t every really feel high-highs, or low-lows. I’m almost always in the same mood. If you know me, you may have recognized that I’m always in a good mood, never really angry or sad. Always steady. I think that comes part and parcel with my reluctance to plan. I don’t feel like I’ve let myself down often. I don’t overthink things. What feels right, I’ll do. If it doesn’t, I won’t. To quote my boy Dwight Shrute from “The Office”, “When facing a decision, I ask ‘would an idiot do this’. If the answer is yes, I don’t do it.” In not planning out much of my life, I was able to not worry about not meeting expectations, simply because I had no expectations! Maybe, just maybe, my personality has taken the form it has BECAUSE I didn’t plan? Sounds like a theory to test out, perhaps in a future blog ;)
Not planning, though, has it’s drawbacks. Especially for a business owner, and for someone’s Daddy. So that part of my life is officially over. It’s not easy for me to say good bye to that. It hurts, truth be told. Planning makes my wife happy, and therefore, me happy. Another saying: “happy wife, happy life” is basically the mantra through my 30s and into my 40s.
So, from this point forward, my path is a planned one. It’s one driven by intention only. And here’s what I expect..
Our family vacations will be great, and they’ll be long
My real estate team will grow, and we’ll rock it. We’ll do so, not by counting the number of sales we make (ew!), but by counting the number of lives we’ve made better
The number of solutions I offer to clients increases, because what we focus on expands
I’ll be able to retire by the time I’m 50, with passive income streams I’ve planned for and built (I can do this for you too, by the way)
My kids will not have to worry about renting or figuring out how to buy their first home. Because Daddy has planned for that, and solved their biggest financial problem in their adulthood.
Congrats PLAN. You win.
Signed,
Your newest fan.