In 1996 Mike Tyson was asked about his plan going into a fight with Evander Holyfield. He’s famously quoted as telling the reporter that “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
This quote came on my radar in the spring of 2014 when I got metaphorically punched in the mouth. My wife and I had spent the past six months dreaming about how we were going to raise our first child, a little guy who was due on May 3rd. We read books on programming sleep patterns. We signed up for daily emails telling us how big our little man was inside of his mother’s belly at that moment in time. We planned.
Well guess who showed up on March 7th, a full two months ahead of schedule?
Guess how useful our proposed sleep training regimen was when our son Collin had the privilege of spending his first 42 nights living in a newborn intensive care unit?
Guess how successfully we managed to “exclusively” breastfeed our child when he wasn’t in the same home as us at every waking moment?
The planning was fun. It was an exercise in anticipation of best case scenarios. What it was not, however, was grounded in a guaranteed reality.
Business ownership, I’ve come to learn, is a similar exercise of planning for an unpredictable future. One minute you’re mapping out your Q2 revenue growth initiatives, and the next you’re teaching your kid a kindergarten curriculum at the kitchen table as your business sits closed due to pandemic-related restrictions.
If we want to increase the likelihood of successful planning, we’ve got to embrace the need for addressing worst-case scenarios. We need to practice the habit of asking ourselves what this would look like if we were to fail? What happens if my business gets shut down again? What if occupancy restrictions are escalated?
The more we challenge ourselves to consider an undesirable reality, the better positioned we are to push forward strategically immediately after getting punched in the face.
As Eisenhower said, plans are nothing; planning is everything.
-Pete
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