New year, but happy?

Talk about mixed feelings! Another year is ready to start and I am not yet done with the old one, or is it the other way  around? For instance, I have not yet worked on the fifth year of my five-year personal plan. My plan is years behind now, and it is looking like I may have to carry it over again.

Does anybody else remember the Five-Year Plan? It was very big with business a number of years back. It was one of those fads. They even used it on job interviews. “Where do you see yourself five years from now?�

Now you had to be careful here. Was the interviewer looking for someone he could groom to take his place so he could move up? Or was he trying to find out if you were too ambitious and might threaten his job? Years later there was a saying, “I never met anybody who worked the fifth year of a Five-Year Plan.� Didn’t anyone notice that the communist countries were using this concept for industry and agriculture and look where it got them.

u      u      u

How about New Year’s resolutions? What is the secret to success? I think we can all learn a lesson from the little old lady who was interviewed on her 80th wedding anniversary. They asked her what was the secret of her successful marriage. Her answer? “Don’t expect too much.�

This is also called leaving room for improvement. This is very important when dealing with management or a spouse (pretty much the same thing). It took me a long time to learn in my early schooling that if you did your best work all the time, all you got, pretty much, was abuse when you did not quite measure up. Now you were expected to excel.

The kids who seemed to struggle received lavish praise for half the results. They got credit for just trying. Nobody was cutting me any  slack. They called it not working up to potential. The only way to beat this is to move far away and start a new identity with a nice, low, baseline of performance. Now you can grow and get all those “most improvedâ€� awards. This is not as easy as it sounds.

In the old days, you were pretty much whoever you said you were. Records keeping was more a suggestion than a fact. Nowadays they find you and then they want to know where the last installment of your Five-Year Plan is.

And where do I see myself five years from now?

Older.

At least that’s the plan.

Bill Abrams resides (and worries about his plans) in Pine Plains.