The best laid plans of kats and men.

"Construction" by LotusHead on SXC

I started this fall with a plan.

Continue kicking butt in my demanding social media job.  Return to school with an eye towards finishing my degree and eventually going on to my Master’s.  Strengthen my relationships with friends and family.

I returned to college this fall with a fairly light course load of two classes.  I’m already juggling a lot of roles–and I wasn’t sure there was room to add “student” to the mix.  But I viewed it as an experiment.  I would do my best, and see how it went.

So far, I’ve aced every test. On the other hand, I will probably still not pass at least one of the classes based on attendance.  At one point this fall, I realized I was going to be out of town on business for 10 of the next 20 working days.  Regardless of my final grades, I made the tough decision to not enroll in any classes for next semester.

I’m not giving up on completing my education eventually.  But this fall has shown me that now isn’t the time.  The sacrifices I have to make in other areas of my life in order to do well at work and school just aren’t sacrifices I’m willing to continue making.

The last few months have been a good road test for some of my future plans.  It’s caused me to reevaluate a number of things.  I’m working on a new plan, and I hope to write about it soon.

Plans are great.  I lived way too much of my life without any plans whatsoever.  But plans aren’t fixed blueprints of how your life will go. They’re more like hypotheses of what direction your life could go in.

One of the things I studied in my psychology class this semester was the importance of holding a hypothesis loosely.  Some stand up to testing and some don’t.

If you find that in being tested, a hypothesis doesn’t hold water, you need to be willing to let it go.  Move on.  Develop a new hypothesis based on what you learned from the one that failed.

Eventually, even failed experiments will lead you closer to the truth.