The advent of a New Year brings with it a sense of optimism, a chance to start anew. We reflect on the year that has passed and we think about what we would like to do different or better in the year to come. And for many of us, we make resolutions.
Don’t get me wrong; I think it is important, even critical that we consider where we want to go and how we want to get there. I am not against all planning. But I am against “planning all”.
We need to plan our budget every month, so we know how much we have to spend and what we are going to spend it on. And we need a certain amount of resolve to attain any goal, like following our budget. But let’s face it; reality does not give a damn about our plans. There will be a snowstorm or someone will get sick or our car will break down. We need to have a plan, but then we need to be flexible. In the case of the budget plan, something will need to give. We will need to reallocate resources from what we had planned to what reality threw at us.
Nobody runs a marathon without training and planning. You have to be prepared in order to accomplish any major goal. You build up your skills and abilities until on race day you are ready. But that training should take into account that you don’t know if the temperature will be hot or cold, or if it will be rainy or dry. And along the way you will run into problems that cannot always be foreseen but must be overcome, whether it is a sore muscle or a fractured bone. Sometimes we are able to overcome it and reach our goal, and sometimes we are not.
As I consider the year ahead I have personal goals that I would like to achieve. There are work and career goals, physical goals, and even relationship goals. If I do not make plans for achieving what I want out of the next year, I will be much less likely to attain the goals I have set for myself. It is hard to have resolve without a plan. One does not become a doctor or lawyer or run a marathon without planning and commitment and resolve.
As we consider what we want to accomplish we must realize that a firm commitment to one goal may leave us without resources to reach another. Like the monthly budget, something has to give. If we resolve to go to medical school, we may not have the resources to also win a gold medal in the Olympics at the same time. It is important to pick the right things to focus on. There is only so much of “you” to go around.
Personal goals are not the only ones we stop to consider at the beginning of a new year. Companies develop sales and production and productivity goals. Like individuals they have limited resources and must prioritize the things they will focus on. Perhaps they will need to put off the ad campaign in order to focus on buying and installing a new widget machine. And companies know that they have to be flexible and that the randomness of reality affects them just like it does individuals. “Stuff” happens and if they do not have the flexibility to change they will be stuck adhering to an outdated and unworkable plan, and they will fail.
We do need to plan, but whether an individual or a business what is more important than planning is developing the skills and values that can guide you and enable you to deal with complex situations in real time. That is why companies and individuals have mission statements, so that instead of focusing on “the plan” they can focus on “the values” that they hold dear.
And what happens if we widen our scope a bit further, what about the bigger picture? Moving beyond ourselves, our businesses and our families, what does the New Year hold for our nation and society? There are a lot of uncertainties. We certainly will all be watching to see what happens with our health care plan. We will be watching the economy and stocks to see what happens there. 2014 is an election year, and as November draws closer that will draw much of our attention.
The Affordable Care Act is a great example of planning gone wrong. First, a decision was made that central planning and coordination of our nation’s health care system would be better than leaving those decisions to millions of patients, doctors, hospitals, and insurers. Obviously I disagree. You see, I realize I have problems planning all of the details of my life in the next year or week or even the next few days. Stop for a minute and think about all of the details any one of us will have to deal with in the next year, all of the little random events that will need to be overcome in order to reach our goals. It is enough to make most people swear off making resolutions.
Our society works because each of us goes about living our lives each day with a set of goals in mind, and a general plan of how to reach them, but with the flexibility to make hundreds or thousands of individual decisions as events arise as we are presented with the reality of the day. The idea that all of those decisions and value judgments can be replaced by central planning from Washington is ludicrous. As 300 million people go about the business of making decisions that reflect our preferences and values, we create a collective society that prefers VHS over Beta or Coke over Pepsi or Apple over Microsoft.
Central planners can never be as efficient or flexible or focused as the combined experiences of all of the individual members of society, working in unison with a collective wisdom that works automatically and keeps us on the right path. It is not perfect, and we make mistakes, but the markets are flexible and generally correct mistakes pretty efficiently.
But the market does not do well when government sticks its dirty nose into our affairs and demands that we follow its preordained plans. And government loves nothing better than to stick its nose into our affairs. In my view government exists solely for the purpose of protecting the natural rights of each individual, but my view is not reality. In reality government has its regulatory tentacles into most every aspect of our lives, like some oversized octopus, planning and deciding things it has no business being in to begin with.
Obamacare is a bad plan devised by a bloated government that is unresponsive to reality. The reality is that the plan is failing before our eyes but unlike individuals or businesses government does not have the flexibility to take the blinders off. It is failing because those who made the plan did not have any idea of the complexity of the task and what kind of giant market forces they were replacing with a few government bureaucrats.
And Obamacare is not the only example. In order to keep us safe from “terrorists”, our government has decided that it should sweep up all of the data from all of our electronic communications so it can go through it to find needles in haystacks. They are blind to any abuses and too arrogant to admit they may have a problem. They feel they can manage our security best by curtailing the rights of individuals to bear arms while using all of that massive pile of data to ensure nothing every goes wrong. The reality is, it won’t work, and the system will be abused.
As the election approaches there are those in the Republican Party who plan to manage the election to make sure it goes “correctly”. They prefer Pepsi to Coke and they want to make sure they get their way. Boehner and McConnell and Rove have a plan. If they can just micromanage the electorate they will be fine. Good luck with that.
It’s good to have a plan, but it is better to have the skills and intelligence to deal with the curve balls life throws at you. It is good to have goals and be committed to them, but you must realize that you have limited resources and you need to be flexible. And it is good to have a strategy and consider tactics, but without values and integrity they will not take you where you truly want to go.
In the end we need to first clarify our core values and then make our goals based on those values. From the values and goals come planning and commitment. One of my goals for this year is to fight for the return of personal liberty, and a system that embraces the core values of freedom and living within our means.
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