We all usually have a life plan. Starting from our teenage years, we start planning when we will get married or be in a relationship, start our career, earn a certain amount of money, own a house, travel the world, reach our ultimate goal of what we want to be in life and a lot more. For a lot of Asians, we usually also have a life plan made for us, in the minds of our family and friends. By when they feel we should have settled down, what career we should pursue and perhaps even what type of life we should lead.

But one thing we all fail to acknowledge in all this planning, is the plan that life has for us. As a parent, I usually always think about the life skills we should be teaching our kids and the next generations to come, and one of the biggest one’s that I feel we cannot miss out on, is the skill of embracing uncertainty.

Life is not about hitting milestones. Life is about creating milestones and letting those milestones change as uncertain circumstances challenge us. While it is important to set out goals of what we want to achieve, so we can strive in a direction with a focus, it’s equally important to understand that these goals are just ideas of what we feel we can be good at, what we feel will give us happiness and perhaps what we feel will take us to a better position from where we are today. But in the path of pursuing these goals, we usually face a lot of uncertainty that challenges us, and rather than getting challenged by it and keep fighting to go back to the certain path of our goal, I suggest we embrace the uncertainty that we face along the way.

Embrace that life will always be uncertain. We will not know which path our career will lead us too, whether we will be in a relationship by a certain age or not, whether we will have a family or not, whether we will live in the places we had wished to live in or not or whether we will even achieve what we set out to achieve in the first place. All we can learn to do, is constantly adapt and evolve as we face these uncertainties and challenges to become more a more evolved person than we were a year or even a day back.

After all, it may be in those uncertainties that we discover opportunities that we had never imagined or planned. Whether it is innovations made centuries back or some of the most recent multi-billion-dollar tech companies that have got created, how many of them were due to opportunities spotted in the most unusual and uncertain of circumstances?

So, next time you talk to someone making a life plan, talk to them not about how to make a better plan but about how to be better prepared for the uncertainties that their plan will bring and how to embrace them. Because you never know if one of your biggest achievements in life could come from the opportunities one of those uncertainties presented.