There Is No Such Thing as a Life Planned

If you still think that going to the right school, getting the right job and making the right decisions will automatically give you the life you planned or guarantee that you will bounce back easily when something goes wrong, it won't.

You can prepare, plan and make very good decisions, and life will still happen differently. This is inevitable and this is why adaptability matters.

Adaptability is a skill we often talk about in the workplace, but not in life in general. Countless job offers include "Must be adaptable", "Comfortable with change" or "Able to work in a fast-paced environment", which is fine, but adaptability is much bigger than your job description.

"Life will not be what you expected" is one of the best explanations of why you need it. Not necessarily to survive, and not even to "live your best life", but to build a life you can be at peace with, even when it looks different from the one you imagined.

A promotion, becoming a parent, moving in with the love of your life or going on the trip you dreamed about for years all require adaptation. And on the other side of the spectrum, infertility, illness, unemployment, a relationship ending or a plan failing require it too.

All of these situations require you to adjust your expectations, your resources and sometimes even the way you imagined your future.

But before I tell you how to become more adaptable, we need to establish something very important.

Not Everything Deserves Your Adaptability

There are two situations where "just adapt" is not good advice.

The first is when a situation requires you to continuously stretch your character, expectations or needs until there is almost nothing left of you. Not every day will be great, some will not even be good and some will barely qualify as neutral. That is life.

However, do not confuse a situation that challenges you with one that continuously depletes you, because at some point what is being asked from you is no longer adaptability. It is erasure.

The second situation is when your environment consistently requires you to act against your fundamental values, and when I say values, I don't only mean, "Am I a good or a bad person?"

Values can also be about the way you want to live. Maybe having fun and enjoying life matters deeply to you, or maybe fairness, family, creativity or independence matter. Maybe you believe adulthood should look a certain way, while the environment around you rewards something completely different.

You can bend for a while, but if existing in that environment requires you to continuously abandon what makes you uniquely you, eventually something will break. Either you abandon your values to fit the environment or your values make it impossible for you to thrive there.

Neither is really adaptation, so with those two situations set aside, how do you actually become more adaptable?

Intentionally this time?

I have three ways to do it, and you can do them all or not.

1. Ponder

Do not immediately say yes or no, and you don't even need to give an immediate maybe. Think about it and say it out loud:

"I need to think about this."

Then come back with an answer and be genuine about it.

You are an adult, but that does not mean you have all the answers. Sometimes you genuinely do not know, and that is exactly why you need time to ponder.

At work, maybe you are offered new responsibilities, which is great, but what do they actually require? More work for a future promotion? What exactly are you trading your time and energy for?

The same applies to relationships. Imagine that you want to get married, which is great, but with whom?

We often say that the person you divorce is not always the person you married because people change, circumstances change and you will change too. So what does commitment mean to you, what are you willing to work through and where are your limits?

If you are already in a relationship and you both want children, the same principle applies. What would this decision require from you financially, emotionally and practically?

People often say that nobody is ever completely ready to become a parent, and maybe that is true, but "I cannot prepare for everything" should not become "I should prepare for nothing." You cannot predict life and you can still take your decisions seriously.

This step is not an excuse to say no to everything. It is simply a reminder to be mindful about decisions that may affect your life for years, or sometimes for the rest of it.

2. Go All In

Adaptability does not mean walking halfway in one direction and changing course every time something becomes uncomfortable.

You are not a weather vane and you do not have to move wherever the wind blows, but you are not a mountain either, completely still and immovable. Adaptability lives somewhere between the two.

It is the ability to look at your current reality and update the way you move accordingly, and once you make a decision, own it and go all in.

This is the grown-up version of "Walk it like I talk it."

You may not know whether your decision is the right one and nobody can give you that guarantee, but you can make the best decision available to you and actually live it. Do the work and give it a real chance because you chose it, you did it and you own it.

And if reality eventually gives you new information? Then you adapt again.

3. See Reality and Welcome Change

Sometimes adaptability is simply about not fighting change because you wish it had never happened. Change is inevitable and resisting its existence does not make it disappear; it often just makes the transition harder.

This does not mean ignoring your emotions, quite the opposite. You can be devastated by something and still recognize that it happened, you can love someone and recognize that the relationship does not work, you can be terrified of leaving a job and recognize that staying is destroying you, and you can be thrilled by an opportunity and recognize that its conditions do not suit you.

Your emotions are information, but they do not get to rewrite the facts.

Seeing your situation clearly gives you something extremely valuable: the ability to move, and sometimes that is the bravest step of all.

The Point

There is no such thing as a perfectly planned life.

There is preparation and there are choices, there are consequences and there is luck, and there are circumstances you could never have predicted.

And there is you, learning how to move through all of it.

So plan seriously, ponder your choices and commit when you choose.

And when reality changes?

Adapt.

Not by abandoning yourself, but by changing the way you move.

Because the goal was never to build a life that follows the plan perfectly. The goal is to become someone capable of living well when it doesn't.