How Should I Plan My Future

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Anticipated and Unanticipated

          Choices come from two sources: Anticipated and unanticipated strategies. You can plan ahead of time for ‘deliberate opportunity’. However, you should never be too stubbornly blind to see new ‘unanticipated opportunities’. 

          Nicely planned strategies give you confidence and corroborate the chance of success. But, no strategy is perfect. You may spend a lot of time trying to perfect your plan. But, things often do not go according to the plan, just because no one can predict future perfectly. 

          A better strategy is to plan out up to a certain extent, and be flexible in execution. During execution, you may see a new opportunity you did not anticipate at the planning phase. A new strategy--called an ‘emergent strategy’--may come out of unanticipated opportunities.          

          Sometimes, emergent strategies could be more successful than planned strategies. The bottom line is you’ve gotta plan, and you’ve gotta be opened to unanticipated opportunities.

Planning Your Life

          Now the tough question is ‘which opportunity should you take?’ The worst possible strategy is to take one opportunity only to realize later that you took the wrong path. 

          Earlier we talked about ‘what assumptions need to prove true’ mindset, which helps prevent project failure. You can use the same approach, when finding a job.  It is important to understand your assumptions, i.e.,  everything not under your control. List all the assumptions and rank them. Focus on the most critical ones. Try to find a way to test whether they are valid. Keep doing this throughout your life. It will improve your decision making process. 

Source: How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon

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Book or Audiobooks?

Personally, I prefer audiobooks. It's fun, and I can listen when I'm doing something else. It also makes other activities (e.g., jogging) a lot more fun. For more detail about audiobooks, please read [this post].

There is one more reason that may encourage you to go for the audiobook version. You can get it now for FREE. Audible offers you a free trial for 14 days. Even if you get the book and cancel the subscription right away (so that you don't have to pay), you can keep the book. And, don't worry if you lost the audiobook file. Just log into audible.com. You can keep downloading the over and over again.

   About the summary: It takes time to finish up a book. And, when you do, sometimes, you want to review what you learn from the book. If you do not make  notes as you read, you might have to go through the book once again. This can be time-consuming when you are dealing with a book. But you can still flip through the book and locate what you are looking for.

However, when the material is an audiobook, it is extremely hard to locate a specific part of content. Most likely you will have to listen to the entire audiobook once again.

This book summary will help solve the pain of having to go through the book all over again.

I am leaving out the details of the books. Most books have interesting examples and case studies, not included here. Reading the original book would be much more entertaining and enlightening. If you like the summary, you may want to get the original from the source below.