Anne Truitt Zelenka

We’re too caught up in thinking we can predict and control the future. I see it with my friends who want to plan their childbearing and career jointly to the nth degree. Then they have trouble getting pregnant. Or they don’t and they’re surprised at how fast it happens. Or, sadly, their children have grave health problems and any thoughts of career success disappear. Alternatively, their first child is so delightfully easy that they wonder why anyone complains about the difficulty of having a family. Then the devil child number two comes along, and they must not only apologize for their insufferable smugness over their parenting expertise but also rethink how easy it is to combine work, or anything at all, with raising children.

You can’t control your experience of parenting. You can’t really control your career either, not in the way career advice books would have you believe. You can’t control most important things in your life. You can decide what to have for breakfast, what car to drive, what blogs to read, where to live. But you can’t control the serendipitous, the lefthand turns, the sudden or frustratingly slow transitions that really make your life your own.

Johnnie Moore’s blog offers inspiration and new ideas. Here’s the quote he pulled from a book chapter called Bramble Bushes in a Thicket that distinguishes idealistic from naturalistic approaches:

In the idealistic approach, the leaders of an organization set out an ideal future state that they wish to achieve, identify the gap between the ideal and their perception of the present, and seek to close it. This is common not only to process-based theory but also to practice that follows the general heading of the learning organization. Naturalistic approaches, by contrast, seek to understand a sufficiency of the present in order to act to stimulate evolution of the system. Once such stimulation is made, monitoring of emergent patterns becomes a critical activity so that desired patterns can be supported and undesired patterns disrupted. The organization thus evolves to a future that was unknowable in advance, but is more contextually appropriate when discovered.

The naturalistic approach could be applied to career and life plans. Do you follow the majority of self help authors’ advice, set some specific and measurable goals, and then try to achieve them? Or do you instead try to understand what’s going on right now then experiment to see what happens?

You can’t control the future. You can’t predict it. You don’t know how things are going to unfold. All you know is, unfold they will, likely in surprising and delightful and horrifying ways. Given that, isn’t it better to think of your life as a tree, then give it good soil and water, prune it cautiously, all the time aware that it will grow in its own shape and by its own design, that fire beetles might attack it or one side might grow lopsided? Instead of thinking that your life is a building to be designed and built according to a fully specified gantt chart?