Screw the “Life Plan”

Seriously. Screw it.

I’ve had a lot of conversations with friends, family and coworkers lately that center around not landing where they expected. Some people have deadlines to get to certain milestones in their life. “I want to be a VP by 30.” “I want to have at least two kids before 35.” Others have an idea of what life was supposed to be, and it ends up completely different. (Sort of like the Talking Heads lyric, “Well, how did I get here?”)

Even though by nature I’m a bit of a freewheeler, I do have plenty of expectations and goals for myself. If you had asked me 15 years ago where I’d end up, I’d probably say in a lab with a bunch of test tubes as my colleagues. Guess what? A math teacher told me I couldn’t follow my left-brained tendencies because math wasn’t for girls. I wasn’t confident enough to know I didn’t need his permission.

So I threw myself into liberal arts and became a journalist. Being flat broke, covering town meetings about snow removal and working nights at a restaurant wasn’t really how I’d pictured my life. I was supposed to be breaking news about the next big presidential scandal before 24.

On a whim I quit both jobs, moved to Boston, and started working as a PR officer at a tech publishing company. The first few years, I felt as if I was compromising. I’d naively call executives and ask them for quotes for press releases, to which they’d respond, “Why don’t you just make something up?” That’s right guys, PR people make up quotes on behalf of executives. The jig is up. I was having a real Talking Heads moment.

Ten years later, I’m still working in PR, but it’s led me to all kinds of crazy places. To the top of a mountain where a wounded Iraq vet snowboarded for the first time — on one leg. To the epicenter of an insane patent trial. To San Francisco and back to Boston feeling like I’d failed. To the unemployment line after my recession-induced layoff, knowing I’d failed. (In hindsight, I hadn’t failed. I simply had a break from agency life to watch the entire “Arrested Development” series with intermittent periods of soft, pitiful crying.)

The truth is, life is unexpected and insane. Recently, an old friend’s fiancee died in a car accident, leaving me to think about how cruel life can be. For weeks, I fell into a dark place, thinking about how I wasn’t living up to what my life should be if I died tomorrow. Pretty dramatic, but not unexpected given the circumstance, I suppose. I didn’t tell many people about how I was feeling.

The silver lining is, I did talk to an amazing mentor, who gives the best advice. We all have grand plans for ourselves. Ask a kindergartner what she wants to be when she grows up and chances are the answer isn’t “stuck somewhere in corporate middle management hell.” On the flip side, how many kindergarteners know what PR is.

Regardless, I felt like all you have to try to do is make a difference in your corner of the universe, one step at a time.

Making a difference in your corner of the universe means finding something you don’t like about your world and running through walls to change it. It means helping those around you change their worlds, even just by listening for a second (Listening is the most underrated skill ever.) It means doing what you say you’re going to do. It means being someone else’s “clutch” person.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll always be ambitious. Your finger will be in many, if not all of the pies. You’ll want to know what’s next. But I wish I took my own advice sometimes: Cut yourself some slack. The people who you impact will know you’re clutch, they’ll reinforce you, they’ll hold you up when you fall. You just need to trust them.

Secondly, if there’s something you want to do, do it unabashedly. Rely on your people to help you do it, or do it yourself. Focus on it. No one is giving you permission. Guess what, you don’t need it.

And finally, screw the life plan. Burn that shit immediately and get present in the moment before it’s gone.