Prepare for the worse and stick to your goal(s).
I played football during my high school days and after my Highschool; I played in the Pepsi Football academy. Football was the path I chose as a career during those days. As footballers, we train every day and do lots of drilling. But once a week, our coach will instruct us to jog around the Stadium 20 times, and if you don’t do it, you will not have access to some benefits for that week.
Many people used to complain about this because it is very crazy stuff to do. Most of the time I go like 12 times, but doing with the team is always fun and 20 times wasn’t a tedious task for me back then.
So, one day, one of the senior guys in the team said, “Coach has started again, “I am not here for this”. The team captain asked, “What are you here for”? He could not reply. Then he told him, “this are the tasks that will build you for your future in football, and always prepare for the worse”.
“Prepare for the worse” means you would face a lot in the journey to reach stardom or your goal (s).
Some days ago, I read a blog about something similar to this and it got my attention big time. But the keyword on this was, “Plan for chaos”.
Not everyone plays football. But you could conform to the philosophy of “prepare for the worse” or “plan for chaos”. This idea could be very useful in life when you are working towards a goal. Sometimes life gets chaotic or busy and having the power and the resource to hold is important.
How this philosophy works.
For instance, you have a plan to work out for 30 minutes every day in the morning, and things around you remained the same, your alarm works to wake you at the right time, then you have no problem achieving your daily goal of 30 min exercise daily. But when things get rocky and busy. The daily alarm failed, and you started saying “I wasn’t expecting this to happen” You started doing things off the plans you tagged important.
Unseen circumstances and chaos are the things that made life unpredictable and sticking to your goals when things get busy and chaotic becomes an enormous challenge.
A few days ago, I made a post about how my friend gadgets were stolen. We have been working on a project together for over 6 months and we were close to achieving our aims and the gadgets that we would use to launch the project worth Millions of my currency here were stolen. That was a big blow on our faces and unpredictable. But we had to look for a way and get back in the track within 4 days.
Now, when things get chaotic, the solution is to use Peter Gollwitzer, a theory which is the IF-THEN Technique.
This is a technique that will help to create a strategy when things don’t go as you plan. It will help you to reduce the scope, but still on your goal. All you have to do is- “If [this doesn’t work], then [your plan and response]
For instance...
If I get up late to watch a tutorial on NODE JS, then I will watch late in the night.
If I can’t cook early morrow morning, I will be back early to the house to cook in the evening.
If-Then makes you to have an alternative in your plans to reach the same goal. This leaves you with no excuses of why you could not get something done. Most of the time, some tiny things are the reasons we change our plans and reduce our goals. But if you plan for the unseen circumstances with the If-Then technique, then nothing would stop you from achieving your goals. You can only have them rescheduled a bit.
When it becomes so hard to manage, take it bit by bit and achieve it.
