Plan A . . .B . . . and O

What would you think when reading those words above? Blood category? Or maybe go a bit racist by thinking its a saying for certain people...nope...nope...see it from a broader perspective ;)

It’s more on how we plan things. As humans, tentunya kita akan melakukan banyak hal terkait perencanaan, entah itu yang bersifat pribadi maupun dalam skala yang lebih besar seperti melibatkan orang lain atau suatu organisasi. Bagaimanapun, perencanaan merupakan suatu aktivitas inheren yang niscaya akan dilakukan manusia manapun dalam hidupnya. Rasanya hanya anak kecil dan orang gila saja yang tidak melakukan perencanaan, why?coz hanya merekalah yang bias menjalani hidup secara carefree tanpa beban utnuk memikirkan hidupnya.

Nevertheless,it is this one thing that also makes humans sometimes suffer and agonize due to the fact that planning is not something as easy as flipping your hand. Perencanaan, walo secara dasarnya melibatkan suatu logika berpikir, namun dalam praktiknya seringkali harus bersentuhan dengan variabel2 eksternal lainnya yang pada akhirnya sedikit banyak akan “menyesuaikan” planning ini sehingga mencapai suatu bentuk akhir yang suka engga suka akan diterima oleh perencana yang bersangkutan.

For example, I’ll start of with something simple. Kita menginginkan ssuatu. Mungkin kalo itu hanya suatu pikiran belaka, itu hanya sekedar wacana atau angan belaka. Tapi ketika kita sudah melakukan dan menuliskan langkah2 yang akan kita lakukan tuk meraih hal itu, maka itu sudah menjadi sebuah rencana. The problem starts here in fact...bahwa rencana akan senantiasa berevolusi mencapai bentuk paling pragmatis kemudian.

It is because the ones who executes plans are humans themselves, it is what makes plans often have to accommodate, adapt and change to the never ending surroundings that comes around us. Sesempurna apapun plan kita, sifat hidup sendiri yang tidak pernah pasti dan penuh ketidaktahuan akan apa yang kan terjadi membuat perencanaan harus senantiasa berubah2.

I’m not saying here that plans should not have a fix things on how to achieve what they want, I’m just stating that plans cannot be made rigidly and neglect the fact that it is only a mere hope written with its steps to gain it. Especially when it interacts with the variable of human being....it then reacts as some sort of chemical reaction...just coping to find the best outcome.

Though you have all these back up plans from A to...ah..just name the alphabet you want...but if you put out the variable of human and life destinies....it again ends up as just a mere thought. There are no such things as a perfect plan. Like in statistics...you can only achieve a degree of trustworthiness until 99%. Where does the last 1% go? Like it or not...it goes back to this one divine decision from the heavens on how it would turn out to be. It is this particular 1 % that makes a plan to be made or even completely broken at all.

That’s why in my religion, we are always to told to not only plan well for everything we do , but also never stop to pray to the heavens for that plan to succeed. Nevertheless, less people understand the significance this 1%. It is as if as long we plan the best, then all good things would come fourth. Unfortunately, life not as logical as that.

Aside the fact that there is this 1%, we also must remember that humans too play part in adjusting our plan. It’s not like we live in a vacuum, where we can just execute any plan without taking into considerations the interactions we have with other persons. Since we live in a society that forces us to interact with all sorts of persons, then there would obviously be a high chance for any plans to change.

But hey…don’t worry….that’s why nowadays they have what they call the science of management. Basically the art of dealing, interacting and arranging the acts of people, this science has really come in handy the last couple of ages and help gear up planning to a different level and erase the hardships that were first thought to hinder a planning completely. The downside is that this is not completely a magic tool that can help cut off the bad side of things…management science still has a long way to go in this part.

With all the explanations above, I’ld reckon myself to be qualified to write a decent book on planning in management :D, however, I just wrote this out of experience, past and recent. My life until now has pretty much thought me that planning is so important, that we should never ever dare to dream for something good unless we have prepared something to gain that thing. Or else, it’ll just end up as mere dreams. Back then…I did live on plans…but most of them were just short to middle term plans. Most of all, they pretty much lacked the element of synchronization.

It wasn’t till I moved to Perth that I started to think of a life long plan for the remainder of my life. It really sounded great, but in fact it is quite the challenging task to do. By this point that I realized, a life long plan should take into account all sorts of things, the good and bad aspects of life. You just cannot deduce that everything is gonna happen coz life is also full of ups and downs. In short, the plan should be prepared for any worst case scenarios.

But when we talk about preparing for the worst, this is also another factor that makes planning furthermore costly and tedious. The fact that we have to prepare for the worst means that we have to do all sorts of things to get ourselves prepared, and this would obviously hit our pocket hard. There are many life examples on this to mention, like savings, insurances and investing. Basically these activities are done to prepare our life for any upcoming hardships that would come by. It would be wonderful if we could just focus life on what we really want to do and plan without having to bother on the backup plans needed for safe beings, but this kind of situation rarely manifest itself into ones life.

Being prepared would also mean that we should have the ability to predict and determine what parts of our life that contribute to the uncertainty. Its not always about finding from the views of others, but identifying ourselves is one step to start this thing. Like a saying…if you can know yourself…then you would know the world….everything starts from us…then we spread things outward. I guess that’s all for now….don’t wanna to talk too much on this matter as I’m afraid it could bite me one day if I just speak and do nothing bout it myself.

PS: for those who really know me….they would have guessed the hidden meaning of this blog’s title :P….yup…..;)