By Riley Beckham, Peer Research Ambassador
Dwight Eisenhower, 34th President of the United States and Supreme Commander of Allied forces in Europe during WWII, is considered by many to be one of the greatest strategic thinkers of the 20th century. As the mastermind behind D-Day, the Allied invasion of Western Europe, Eisenhower was a shrewd planner who was determined to account for all possible contingencies. Yet, when reflecting on his experiences in the Army many years after the war, he is quoted as saying “Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable”.
To many of you reading this blog, the above statement may seem paradoxical upon first inspection. After all, if plans are useless, why bother making them? To illustrate the wisdom of Eisenhower’s words, I’d like to use my own experiences as an example.
As a high school graduate in the year 2020, I thought I had my whole life figured out. I thought I had planned out every possible contingency, thought of every path laid out ahead of me and narrowed down everything to the ultimate way forward. I was gonna go to college, graduate on time, get a nice stable job, then go on with my life from there. Everything would be simple and straightforward. Not easy, surely. But simple.
I’m sure you can see where this is going. Covid hit, and mine and everyone’s lives were upended. I watched a virtual high school graduation ceremony on my laptop, then spent my first year in college alone in a near vacant dorm, living in what seemed like a ghost town of a campus. With all this happening, I had a hard time adopting to life on my own, and being a student came with its own challenges. My first year of grades were far from where I wanted them to be, and it was hard not to fall into cynicism and doubt. Nothing was going according to plan, I thought to myself. Was all of it pointless? How can I have any control over my life if all my well-laid out preparations are swept away by something I never could have seen coming?
Sooner or later though, I started to realize the spontaneity of life was part of what makes it all worth living. It was my first research job, something I had never planned for or considered up until that point, that started to change my perspective about planning ahead. Through that job, I have since been afforded so many opportunities and connections that I never would have gotten otherwise. I had foreseen none of it, and yet know I can’t imagine how my life would have gone if I hadn’t found and seized those opportunities.
The mistake I made, and many others also make, was prioritizing the wrong thing. The plans I had laid were ultimately meaningless the moment things started to go differently than I had imagined, and clinging to them after the fact was only dragging me down. But the planning ahead of time, the hours spent contemplating my future, engaging in introspection about what was important to me, was time very well spent. It helped me figure out who I was and served as the guiding light that led me to all the amazing opportunities I’ve since discovered off the beaten path.
Plans can make a prisoner of us all, but the act of planning is truly invaluable. Through planning, we learn what is valuable to us and come to understand the sort of person we wish to be. We discover how we handle conflicts and setbacks, which prepares us for when our plans don’t go the way we want.
To those reading this who can identify with the story I have told, take heart; do not become a slave to the plans of your past. Do not toil aimlessly to fulfill the wishes of a person who no longer exists. Instead, recognize how much you have grown and how far you have come. Take a moment to thank your younger self for their diligence but be prepared to grow beyond your original intentions. In so doing, you will discover your own way forward, becoming more capable than you ever thought possible.
Riley is a senior majoring in Electrical Engineering. Click here to learn more about Riley.