What I’ve always known — and what this year reinforced for me — is that the road will be full of the unexpected. Things don’t just go wrong — things *will* go wrong. You’ll leave 60 minutes before that presentation, but the New York City subway system will turn a 20-minute trip into a 55-minute adventure. You’ll get stranded at the Detroit airport for, somehow, 48 hours. You’ll fry a laptop at the airport just before boarding a 13-hour flight home. (All of that really did happen this year.)
Things are going to go wrong, and no amount of prep work is going to prevent that from happening. So the big question is: When it happens, can you still find a way to make it work?
When things go wrong, I try to look for all the best possible outcomes. Stranded on the train? Well, that’s an extra 20 minutes to prep for the meeting. Stuck in Detroit? Let’s get a hotel and reschedule those meetings as video calls. Laptop’s dead? That’s OK — did you know the Duty Free store sells Mac laptops now?
Shit happened in 2019, and I’m sure 2020 will be full of many more unexpected (and unwanted) surprises. Here’s my wish for you: When it does, don’t dwell on it. Text your loved ones (“You won’t believe what happened to me THIS time!”), give yourself a minute to regroup, and then figure out what doors are still open for you. Whatever happened, I promise it’s just a speed bump along the way. If you look carefully, there’s always still a path forward.
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That’s a photo I took at the Brisbane airport back in November. I’m holding the laptop I bought at Duty Free a few minutes earlier. I wouldn’t usually recommend an impulse purchase like that, but it turns out there are circumstances that call for such a purchase!