The key part of a plan
#30 - watches thinner than a coin (!)
Hi there,
It’s been a lovely week with all the love and concern that has come my way. It just feels so good when people empathise with you and their reactions of “That must have hurt” in a selfish way make you feel good.
The disruption has been more than the occasional headache but my diet has been limited, I’m not able to do any sport or exercise and my musical instruments are gathering dust. 🤞the dentist gives me the ‘all clear’ tomorrow morning. Whilst there might be the need for further procedure, I haven’t felt any pain all day and should be allowed to, frankly, get on with my life.
Aside from my teeth, it’s been a busy week with my Grade 7 LAMDA Speaking in Public, educating an examiner on why you should laugh more (this definitely isn’t a future blog post idea…), informing (the imagined audience of) high school medicine aspirants about abortion before choosing “Smartphones come at a price.” for my Impromptu speech.
But, the highlight of the week would be all the effort put to celebrate the leaving of my class teacher. Maybe ‘celebrate’ is the wrong word - I do like him! We commemorated his incredible service to the school, as an ex-pupil and now teaching career 8 years strong, with a funny tribute video, a personalised card and a shirt of his favourite football club (think it’s fair to say he likes it!)
And the process of organising a gift, a card and a video gives us the topic for this week (which is something that my head has been twisting and turning over. I’ve had lots of fragments of blog-worthy thoughts but not anything that seemed like it could form a full idea.)
When reflecting on what I can learn from this experience over the past 2 weeks of trying to get together these goodies, as we all should try to derive from anything we do, I’ve been reminded of one of my favourite quotes from Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money
“Planning is important, but the most important part of every plan is to plan on the plan not going according to plan”
Read it again. And slowly, again.
In more readable terms, when you are planning an activity, you need to consider what part of this plan might not go as expected and account/plan for that.
Where does this apply here? Well, we didn’t actually get the shirt on time; it was late by a day. In the end, I found him at a school event that took place in the evening and handed it to him there.
We had thought that we could get delivery in 3-4 days, which we had underestimated. It was when my co-organiser Charlie went to buy it that he noticed the delivery date that we realised that we had to hurry and, in the end, juuuuusst missed the boat.
What we should have done when we decided that we were going to buy him a shirt is thought about all the things outside of our control and therefore what we need to account for.
It is also crucial that everyone is on the same page. One useful tactic is to visualise you going through each stage of the process (producing a selection of gifts, getting the class’ opinion, asking for the personalisation, buying it, collecting the money) and thinking through what could possibly go wrong. It seems obvious but a conscious effort is needed. As one of my favourite quotes goes, “Failing to plan is planning to fail”. This goes for anything in life: studying, an essay, a recipe and even a day out. Planning is so essential that I’m sure it will be something that crops up again on The Sun’s Out.
A few other pointers that may help you on your next ‘project’ that requires some form of teamwork:
Start well in advance 🗓️ - we were restricted by having our mock exams run right through the week when we would’ve made the most progress but everything should have, obviously, happened a day earlier.
Provide solutions, not just problems ✅ - looking back at our chat history, there are quite a few instances of me finding fault with an idea (and vice versa, of course) and I ensured that every time I either provided an alternative (hopefully better) solution or owned up to not knowing what else could be done. But always tend towards option 1: when you take issue to a plan, explain why (it should be a convincing reason) and then provide a solution; it makes your case more likely to be accepted.
Make people feel empowered and valued, and give praise generously 🤝 - whilst it was Charlie who was the member pushing for movement and trying to avoid inaction, it turned out that I was the one who got the credit for the project, because I was a bit more outspoken, when really it was both Charlie and my cooperative efforts that made it possible. Yes, I might have come up with the idea of a Leeds shirt but it was him who kept prodding me to ‘get stuff done’, making sure we were on track. When I recognised this, I made conscious efforts to thank Charlie, give him credit and actively ask him and other people in the mini-leadership group we had for their thoughts.
If you take responsibility for something, do it. Don’t make empty promises 🙇 - this came with me saying I would create a group chat for the whole form and put out a message explaining the position. Life happened and I didn’t get round to it when I said I would do it by a certain time. Remember, it doesn’t have to be just all you doing the work. Trust others to do a job as well as you could or even better.
Keep everyone on the same page with constant updates 📄 - hugely important! Our most effective work was when we produced updates on the status of various parts of the operation. This could be done with a document with updates.
Thank you Mr Greenwood. Your departure is a sad one, albeit lessons were learnt! Happy Easter everyone.
Book of the week 📖
I’ve been reminded of the school of thought that books don’t have to be read from cover-to-cover, as I’ve retired from reading Cashflow Quadrant. Instead I’ve picked up Listen to the Moon, a book I got as a prize 3 years ago.
Podcast of the week🎙️
WorkLife with Adam Grant - How to Rethink a Bad Decision
An exploration into an irrational yet common thing we do - putting more commitment behind something that is ultimately the wrong thing to do.
Article of the week📰
The watch world has gone mad (in a good way)
The lengths and heights (or rather sizes) to which watches are being innovated are utterly incomprehensible
Quote of the week💬
“Failure is not the opposite of success, it is part of success.” - Arianna Huffington
Hope you fail to fail to fail* in the next seven days 😊. Or maybe our quote disagrees.
Adi
P.S. The summer is getting closer! Usually I write in pitch dark outside but the sky is still blue
*That’s my attempt at beating the confusion of Housel’s quote.