You may remember this quote from the book, "Of Mice and Men." It's a pretty solid quote and I see that it has been showing up in my life more and more recently.

The fact of the matter is that the only thing in life that you can always count on is change and things to not go as you may have planned. I'll throw another cliche at you right now, "the only constant in life is change."

You can work things out 100000 times over in your head, but its bound to happen that the outcome just isn't as you wished. Thats kind of a fuck up isn't it. You do all the planning and you think all the steps through, and then when you implement the strategy the whole thing just blows up in your face.

A lot of shit has blown up in my face. I've tried to think a lot of things through, do things for certain people that I thought would provoke a given response, and in most cases, the response never occurs. You think to yourself, "But, I thought it all out, I saw it from every angle, how is this possible?" But what it really comes down to is honesty.

Plans go wrong most of the time because there are two or more parties involved. There is you and society, there is you and a friend, there is you and a significant other, there is you and whoever. There are two parties involved in making plans. If the other party is grossly dishonest with you, and tries to cover it up, there is no way that your plans can ever work out.

It is through no fault of your own either. The plan went awry because of the dishonesty from the other end. It is a cunning and evil thing to be dishonest with someone. But this is why plans fail, and although they do, they need not be the first or last plan that fails. Failure is a good thing at times.

It helps you to reassess and make improvements. Mice and men. Both have failed plans. But the same way a mouse will move on without giving too much thought to his failure, it is important for men to do the same. Don't dwell too hard on spilled milk, for it is just spilled milk.

This post was originally written by Tyrone Schiff
University of Michigan · Organizational Studies · 12 Jan 2007