I’ve mentioned before that I love playing the game 1010! on my phone. It is a grid game, sort of like Tetris, where you are trying to fit the pieces all together, so that when a solid line of ten blocks is formed, it disappears, making more room, for more pieces to be added. The game ends when you cannot fit the various shaped pieces to be played, on to the grid anywhere.
I have come to learn that I am most successful in the game and I tend to get my highest scores, when my focus is on just getting a line to disappear. On the other hand, when I try to make the grid look perfect and set up patterns and I try to make a whole lot of lines disappear at once, is usually, when I set myself up for failure. Invariably, an odd figured shape comes out of nowhere and because I have so many pieces neatly placed on the grid, there is nowhere to put the unexpected shape.
I was a marketing major in college and I have held various sales positions, over the years. “Always be closing!” is something that they preach to you in sales. I repeat that mantra to myself when I am playing 1010!. It reminds me to keep my eye on the goal, racking up points and keeping the grid relatively empty, by making lines disappear, no matter how messily that happens.
It struck me the other day, that life is a lot like this. We get goals in mind, but we get tripped up, thinking exactly how those goals should come about. We want things to be neat, easy and orderly, but that’s not really how a lot of life goes. When we keep our eye on the prize – our goal, we are more open to the different avenues and approaches of how that goal may be attained. We aren’t as easily thrown for a loop, when something unexpected (that dang, hard to place shape) comes our way. When we believe in the goal, we know that there are many possible ways to get to the goal and that forces bigger than us, are helping us along the way. When we keep focused on the desired end result, and we aren’t as worried about how we get to that end, but just hold on to our faith that we will get there, however messy and hard and full of surprises the journey to the goal may end up being, we have a much better likelihood of success. When we hold fast to how we think an objective should be attained, we more easily get stuck and mired in disappointment. We have lost our vision of the goal, because we keep eyeing “the pretty picture” of how we think the goal should come about. When we do that, we have lost our way.
“Failed plans should not be interpreted as a failed vision. Visions don’t change, they are only refined. Plans rarely stay the same, and are scrapped or adjusted as needed. Be stubborn about the vision, but flexible with your plan.”