I've Got Everything Under Control
Feeling confident, being ready to move – and then it fails
You know it isn’t true!
Even if you think that you have prepared everything well, and you have the experience, the will, and the power to do what you are planning to do, there will always be something you didn’t know, something you do not have in control.
We often encourage each other to look overly optimistic on things. Worries are seen as weakness, as if you are not strong enough to handle whatever problems might appear. You must show confidence.
And to do that, you’ll analyze, plan, prepare, and do everything by the book, adding additional risk management due to your great experience.
And then the lightning strikes, or a meteor falls down.
You cannot have everything under control. It is common to say so, but it never happens. You can have all those things under control that you know of, but even that requires a lot of activities and a lot of trust in others, who could quickly do something wrong. And then there are all those things you do not know about.
Whatever you do in life, there’ll always be a lot you don’t know. Think about it: science, as we know it today, has been studying, experimenting, describing, and discussing for thousands of years – thousands of scientists at any time being occupied with finding out about those things, big or small, that we do not know. And yet, they are not done. There is still a lot more to find out. And, actually, the more they find out, the more new questions appear – new things to find out about.
Even if you’re not a scientist, you do the same: study, experiment, describe, and discuss – to make sure that you have uncovered everything needed before doing something. It can be anything, really.
Building a house? You’ll have a design made, hire people, and buy all the materials, and you’ll make registrations, apply for permissions, and engage other parties, such as an electricity provider, to set up the needed accounts and connections of all kinds. You may even arrange for cover if it rains, and draining, solid driveways, etc., so even the weather cannot ruin your project. But there’ll be a wrong delivery of nuts and bolts, being the wrong dimensions, and one of the balks needed to hold up the building will get damaged during transportation. And people will get ill, a heatwave will unexpectedly appear, and the design of the house may turn out to be slightly inconvenient, having a heavy section over a light wall, which will need to be redesigned in order to actually be buildable.
Along the way, you may understand that some of it could have been foreseen – you could have had it under control, if only you had thought about it. But you didn’t. Or you did, but put the thought aside, because it seemed unrealistic. Or you actually had a conversation with one or more experts about some of it, and the solution just didn’t end up fitting the real world.
The next time you’ll build a house, you’ll pay extra much attention to those things that went wrong this time. But then there’ll be a new set of problems appearing, being special for that project.
And that’s life!
You never have everything under control.
In some settings, you can attempt to go berserk in your risk management, taking everything thinkable into account and make remedies against it all. A microchip factory, for instance, is being built under such a rigid regime of risk management. When built and taken into use, the factory simply must work, basically non-stop. It is immensely expensive to build such a factory, and the investment will only pay back if it can be utilized during all the planned operating time.
You’ll make the factory earthquake-proof, up to a certain level on the Richter scale, and you’ll make it hurricane-proof, perhaps even bomb-proof, and you’ll implement all kinds of security measures and control and regulation mechanisms, all possible prevention from contamination slipping into the production, keeping the whole factory area one big clean room, to ensure that nothing can stop the production or ruin the products’ quality.
You’ll get very close to having everything under control.
But even then, maybe a bigger earthquake than anticipated will happen, and the supplies of materials needed takes a hit, becoming unavailable in the needed amounts for a while. Or a sudden shift in the market needs, or the invention of new technologies that your factory cannot produce, will render the whole facility useless long before the expected time, even if it technically still works.
You cannot plan for everything, and you just have to accept some risks. Hence, you’ll never get everything under control. Instead, you may, if you are skilled and a bit lucky, get the selected set of needs and risks under the wanted level of control.
So don’t expect more from yourself or others. Be ready, instead, to help and assist, to encourage and advise, whenever anything seems to be wrong around you, to bring back that control that will get lost from time to time.
That’s how not to “be in control” but to act with caution and purpose. This way, you’ll not lose the control, as you never had it, but you’ll continue doing what you were doing all the time: monitor and adjust. Fix the failures when they appear. And help others do the same.