"Each strike out puts me closer to the next home run."
—Babe Ruth
At the beginning of each school year, Sean and I map our fall schedule, and we usually have every weekend planned up through January 1! Michael's Ravens games are every Sunday, with a few exceptions. SJ has football games on Friday night and then his basketball season starts the first of November. Collins coaches an inner-city cheerleading squad and she attends their games on Friday nights so we try to hit a few of those too. Plus we squeeze in a few Ole Miss games here and there. By mid-October the Grizzlies start to play and Sean does their TV color commentary. It is enough to make your head spin and leaves little room for error.
The first delayed flight happens and the plan falls apart quicker than a house of cards. One weekend as I was fretting over this, I looked at Sean and said, "What's our Plan B? Do we have one?" He replied in his serious voice, "Did Michael Jordan have a Plan B when he got cut from his high school basketball team?"
I said, "Get out! He got cut? He must have been so disappointed!"
When life doesn't go according to plan what do you do? Do you have a Plan B, an alternate route to take?
After Sean and I had been married a few years, we set our sights on owning a fast food restaurant. But we didn't have the money to purchase one. We hocked everything we owned and borrowed money from everyone we knew. We raked leaves and trimmed bushes. We did anything we could think of to scrape together enough money to pursue our dream. Finally after much planning and saving, we thought we found the perfect situation: buy a Burger King. We then filled out stacks of papers, signed things we didn't understand, and I'm pretty sure we signed away our first born child. We sent these massive amounts of signed paperwork to all the appropriate "fast food authorities." Then we waited. We sat by the phone; we paced the floor, and we ran to the mailbox every day for what seemed like an eternity.
Finally one Thursday afternoon Sean walked into the house, and by the look on his face, I knew it was bad news. All he could say was, "We didn't get approved." How could we not get approved? We did everything right; we played by the rules! This was not fair! We were astonishingly disappointed.
It was one of those character-building moments.
Today, I feel certain I have an awareness I wouldn't have otherwise had without the setbacks I've experienced. In fact, one of most important lessons Sean and I continue to tell our three kids is "You learn from misfortune and mistakes; it's part of what makes you who you are."
My grandmother always reminded me when one door closes, a window always opens. The new path, the one you didn't expect, will most likely give you a fresh strength of mind so that you will have a different level of motivation and determination. The hardest times offer the opportunity to make us more grateful, more hopeful, and stronger. We are given the chance to use the rejections and failures as growth opportunities. With each and every stumbling block, we have the choice to sit and stew about how bad things are, or we can let them fuel our willpower to press on and reach the finish line, even if the line has shifted somewhat.
After all, Michael Jordan did just fine with his Plan B.
In my own life, the Plan B's make me more determined to achieve my goal. The sun still rises the next morning and the world keeps spinning. Looking back, I now believe the alternate plan was more often the better path for me, but of course, I didn't know it at the time.
Babe Ruth once said, "Each strike out puts me closer to the next home run." Each of life's misfortunes just puts us closer to becoming successful! Will the world stop spinning if you aren't married by 30 or have a baby by 35 or make a million dollars by 40 or retire by 60? No! Don't lose your level of energy and enthusiasm just because the original plan didn't succeed. Hard times require good old-fashioned willpower. Remind yourself that just because you had to shake the Etch-A-Sketch and start over, it doesn't mean there won't be a happy ending.
We should always develop a contingency plan, even while being faithful to our task. Therefore, when failures arise, you can more easily step back and re-examine what you are doing, and, with a little patience, you can have Plan B ready to go!
Also, I find it helps to keep in mind that the suffering and rejections are temporary. They will one day be just a memory. Today, Sean and I own in excess of seventy fast food restaurants. For the record, they are not Burger Kings. They are Taco Bells, KFC's, Long John Silver's, and Pizza Huts. The plan was altered and for that I am really, frankly, that King on those Burger King commercials scares me!
