Your Life Plan Will Fail, but Maybe That’s a Good Thing

My first entry into Medium Writers Challenge, this is my story of how I went from wanting everything to be planned to realizing that nothing is in our control, and that maybe it’s a good thing

I have always wanted an easy life.

This is not to say that I never wanted problems, but just that I wanted the kind of problems that I can handle.

You see, I had this well-crafted plan for my life, including things I want to do or achieve and the problems I am likely to experience as I try to achieve them. There was room for things that may go wrong, but this was only for the things that either:

a) I anticipated or was prepared to handle or
b) Things I didn’t care much about

So it may not come as too surprising to you that my plans didn’t go as planned, including the things that weren’t supposed to go as planned.

All this started from my teen years onwards and continued till my early 20s, so I believe it’s understandable that I was frustrated throughout the whole process despite the precious lessons it was gaining me.

All this sounds like a bit in the past. So is everything sorted now? Far from it. What’s changed, however, is the way I view all this drastic change of plans.

It’s the death of my old, hyper-planning, wanting-it-to-be-easy self. So let’s get started talking about my journey.

The Start

Teenage years are a mess, said everyone ever. You are this person who’s transitioning into adulthood and who’s sometimes unsure if she even wants to make that transition. Pimples, insecurities and peer pressure galore and sometimes make you do pretty stupid stuff.

I am tempted to launch into a tirade of how society just makes this worse by making us take so many important, life-changing decisions and how the standards of success or beauty or whatever just keep us trapped, sometimes until we are all old and grey.

But we are talking about me here, so I will just state how all this started affecting me and my world.

Basically, this was the time when I was supposed to become this confident, outgoing, extroverted version of myself that I always envisioned myself to be when I ‘grew up’. Instead, I had someone who was even more shy and insecure than before, and who was seeing all her best friends becoming more like her foes, or just someone she didn’t recognize anymore.

It was a time I was supposed to bloom and blossom. I spent it trying to weather the storm instead.

Although all this got better towards the end of my teen years and I was grateful for many of the lessons I learned, there were still a lot of things where I wished things had just gone as planned.

The Epiphany

I stumbled from my teenage years into med school. Things were going as planned. Then, as a second year student with surprisingly less work on my hands, I decided, through a series of another major realizations, that I am starting a blog.

I’d always dreamed of having a business one day, and blogging seemed like a great idea because, being online, it had none of the restrictions that prevented me from starting a real life business before graduating.

Blogging meant that I fast forwarded to those dreams of mine that were supposed to be at least 4–5 years away. I was surrounded by visions of working on your passion, escaping the 9 to 5, six figure incomes and working in your pajamas.

However, after about 3 years of doing this, something wasn’t working. I found myself less and less interested in this blogging thing while still not having made my six figures.

I knew that this had something to do with me not writing for money and me not being able to stay focused on just one thing. I felt guilty because I was unable to follow the blogging success formula even though I knew it by heart. I also felt like a coward because I hadn’t quit medicine to follow the quit-college-and-become-a-millionaire formula. The fact that I had lost my interest in medicine by now — something that I never expected — didn’t help either.

Needless to say, I felt pretty frustrated and a failure.

Then one day it hit me: It’s not supposed to be easy, it never is, no matter what the formulas and successful people would have you believe. I was exposed to the stories of how successful people struggled during their earlier years, the kind of stories that we often brush past to get to the shinier bits. I realized that anyone who’s ever done anything that mattered has had it the hard way.

I also realized that, as ambitious as I was, I’d always wanted things to be easy. I realized that I lacked a central vision of who I want to be and I finally understood what they meant when they said that it’s purpose that matters, and not passion.

You see, my dreams, as big as they seemed to me at the time, were just scattered bits and pieces of things I wanted to do or learn, places I wanted to go to and things I wanted to experience, all of which was supposed to happen in a relatively easy way. All of these things were about me rather than about others.

I went from having a fairly clear direction in life to not knowing what I even wanted to be doing. But on the bright side, I started focusing on helping others, something which would enable me to keep going long after my selfish interests have waned.

Present Day

The last sentence might again make it feel like I have it all figured out and again, you’ll be wrong to think so. I do have a much clearer vision of my purpose in life and what I want to help people with, but much of how to achieve that vision is still shrouded in mystery.

And, of course, I am a lot more forgiving of myself when I fail to achieve my ideal goals these days, even though I beat myself up for that every now and then.

This has been a story of the death and revival of my dreams and ideals, and if there’s one thing that I’d like you to take from this, it’s this:

No one has it figured out, and no one has it easy. And easy is not all that fun anyway. You are much better off working towards an impossible looking purpose, even if it takes you a lifetime to get there.

Are you the kind who likes it easy or hard? What’s your take on passion vs purpose? Has your story been similar to mine? If yes, how? If no, how’s it been so far? I’d love to know!