TORTOISE vs. HARE
Tuesday Mar. 12, 2019
If we’d planned ahead, would we have planned for this?
Sure we planned.
Everybody did – but how many of us planned for our lives to turn as they have?
We planned for our journey but youthful planning provided for sunshine, smooth pavement and a gently winding road to success, fulfillment and happiness. Those plans didn’t include the ditch, sharp turns, forks in the road or ‘bridge out’ moments when planning got set aside or tossed out the window, tragedy or catastrophic illness or injury …
With all that learning from failed planning behind you, what’s your plan now?
Not short term planning, but rather what next year looks like and the year after that? Sadly as we get older, ideas about planning ambitious things which take a long time is something we shy away from – whether because of health/time constraints or because we’ve learned how very hard things can be. The advantage I think is we’ve learned that hard things are much easier when digested one bit at a time. Hard things are easier when we get older because we aren’t dealing with all that hard learning, surprises, disasters and forks in the road we’ve deal with before – been there, done that.
Getting older gives us a freedom we’ve never experienced in earlier stages of life. We are smarter and more experienced to be sure, but we have fewer obligations and constraints. We are not limited by the boss we don’t like, the competitor in our way or ‘tapes we play’ about what we were once told we couldn’t accomplish.
Getting older can be an ‘I’m nearly done’ time, or an ‘I’ve just begun time’. I like the just-getting-started viewpoint. While it might be true there is more path behind us than ahead of us, I think our bi-focal vision improves – we can see what is right in front of us while also having a long term vision of what we can do, where we are going and an actual notion of how we are going to get there.
AND, we are invisible to every competitor out there because they are, as we once were, looking over their shoulders at their competitors. When they do their SWOT analysis we aren’t on their radar screen because most people in their highly productive 30s and 40s don’t see folks in 50s, 60s or 70s as competition at all – they see as old, not tech-savvy, slow …
Yay said the tortoise!
Reader feedback:
TO CHOOSE FREELY
Loved this one today, MJ, Calgary, AB
