Go With The Flow Vs. Make It Happen, Which Is It?

by Larry G. Maguire

Go With The Flow

They say you’re supposed to plan, to set goals, not simply go with the flow of things.

Go after what you want relentlessly until you make it yours.

Step out your process and know exactly where you are at every moment. Anything less is to be flakey and unreliable, or at best mediocre.

And so we do, we follow the advice.

We go hard after the things we want. The job, the career, the wife, the home and all the status symbols that match our ideas of success.

We make achieving the results really important.

And then for some reason, you reach a point along the road where all that effort, time and energy seems pointless.

At best the results appear inconsistent.

Sometimes your effort seemed to work for you, and at other times your effort seemed to work in spite of you.

What’s going on with that?

It Seems To Work In Reverse

When I consider the most significant experiences of my life to date it appears to me that they occurred without any prior planning, goal setting or otherwise.

Buying my first home, my second home, making money, starting in business, meeting my wife and having kids, living in the US, folding two businesses, the list goes on.

Both so called good and bad experiences of the most significance seem to me to have occurred outside my conscious will to make things happen.

I certainly didn’t consciously will my business to go down the tubes – twice.

There was no planning in any of it.

In retrospect, it seems to me that the positive results were more about doing what I felt like doing and going with it, than conscious planning.

There was an effort in it, sure, but it none of it was a laboursome effortful thing.

I didn’t preconceive and meticulously plan any of it.

In fact, anything that I did plan and work on consciously went to shit..

So in the last number of years, I’ve taken to doing various stuff, but mostly sitting around thinking, to just let things happen and see where it goes.

And guess what…

My life is still good, in fact, it’s better, and nobody died.

The Fool In His Folly

I’ve spoken with friends who have experienced similar to me and to us who agree, it is obvious.

Pushing things around, trying to make things happen, forcing people and circumstances to bend to our will just doesn’t work long term.

Exercising the need to control things is counter productive.

All it causes is suffering.

Now, at the same time that it doesn’t work, it does serve a purpose.

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