There was a time in my life as a Congregational pastor that I would sit down and plan sermons and activities for a year or more. The more I planned the less it seems that the plan worked. There were always interruptions of one kind or another. Then I read in a long-forgotten publication that goals no longer worked, but that goals required tactics. It isn’t that you don’t have goals; you still do. What do you do when your goal for the day or for the week needs to be revised or changed?
William Arthur Ward observed: We can choose to throw stones, to stumble on them, to climb over them, or to build with them. The stones are the obstacles that we meet in every-day life.
Dealing with stones is the understanding of Scott Adams who writes the Dilbert strip[1]. He writes especially about tough choices. That’s tactics.
“What’s the future look like? I’ll tell you: It’s about tough choices. For example, this morning I noticed that my electric razor had spilled its entire collection of whiskers all over the inside of my fashionable leather toiletry bag. I had two choices. I could laboriously remove those whiskers, individually cleaning each of the other contents of the bag, thus missing at least an hour of useful work, or I could say to myself, “If I didn’t mind having those whiskers on my face, why should I mind them on my little traveling aspirin bottle?”
“I chose the latter. After all, I already got used to the toothpaste all over everything in that bag. How bad could a few hairs be?
“That’s what the future looks like — a bag filled with toothpaste, whiskers and unidentified containers. We’re entering an age when the things we need to do and want to do are absorbed and overwhelmed by other things we need to do and want to do. We’ll make random, often stupid choices because we don’t have the brains or the time to do better.”
So, we plan but with our planning we realize that circumstances may change and so must the plan.
[1] Scott Adams, The Dilbert Future: Thriving on Business Stupidity in the 21st Century (New York: HarperBusiness, 1998), 89.