A kite on a string

It is fashionable these days to talk about planning your life. By that, I mean planning how you want it to look and then executing the plan to make it happen. The self-help gurus love to give you the formulas for life planning. So do your local network marketing friends.

In theory, there is nothing wrong with that. I have written down a life plan before and it has really helped me. Sculpting the way you want your life to look is wise. For example, no one would debate the wisdom of saving money for the future; that is a Biblical principle. Finances is just a small piece of it though. Considering the long term ramifications of all the things we do today is a profitable exercise.

There are two caveats of course. First and most obviously, we don’t have too much control over the future. There comes a point in life where we all start to wake up to the significance of that truth. The best possible financial planning will not ensure wealth in the future. A healthy lifestyle will not secure you a healthy body. Working hard today does not ensure a life of leisure tomorrow.

Secondly, the idea of planning your life is probably a very modern fad that has come about because of the enormous prosperity we enjoy. It is a very cultural thing because of the bubble we are blessed to exist in. Take retirement for example. A leisurely retirement is a new concept. The world never thought of retirement in that way until the last century.

Even today, in most of the world, the idea of playing golf for the last few decades of your life while living on savings is laughable. The truth is that the vast majority of the world’s population is struggling just to put today’s food on the table. They are too busy trying to keep their head above water to worry too much about what their life will look like a few decades in the future. Condemning those people for not planning their life is silly until you walk a day in their shoes. If you are fortunate enough to have the luxury to execute a life plan, just be thankful.

And while you are developing that life plan, I want to caution you about something and here is a story to set it up. One day when young, my brothers and I were flying a kite in a strong wind and the string broke. Immediately, the kite flew over a set of trees and disappeared. It took off so fast in that wind that we figured it would maybe land somewhere in China.

The next morning on the way to church, we passed our neighbor’s house and their children were in the front yard flying a kite: our kite. Strong wind or not, it had landed only a few hundred yards away from where we were flying it. It stopped flying because it lost its string. It turns out that a kite needs string to fly.

That is sort of counterintuitive isn’t it? After all, the string is what holds the kite back; it limits the kite to only a few hundred feet of altitude. The string is what keeps the kite from really soaring as far as it really might want to go.

Yet a kite without a string is worthless. A string provides a counterbalance to the wind. It creates a tension that allows a kite to function.

Humans are like kites. We might have the goal of leisurely floating through life doing whatever we want, but ironically, we need counterbalance too. We need responsibilities and we need tough times. We need pressure. It might be tempting to think a life without those things would be optimal but such a life is unnatural and unfulfilling.

As an entrepreneur, I have been on both sides of that fence. I have been through enormously difficult times and I have been through times where things just seemed to magically happen regardless of when I got out of bed. I don’t like the enormously difficult times but I will tell you something I have learned about myself during the really good times: if I don’t have some pressure in my life, something seems missing. In fact, I will often catch myself almost unconsciously trying to manufacture some pressure to fill the void. For example, I start taking more risks with money.

There is a reason why highly successful people often lose their way and end life tragically. There is a reason why retirement is widely believed to be dangerous to your health. There is a reason why a life of leisure is often a miserable life.

The truth is this: to be all that we are intended to be, we need the string as much as the wind. If we are going to be useful at all, we need the hard work that wears us out. We need the tension in our lives that comes from being engaged in the responsibilities of life. We need the pressures and even the failures. Chasing a life devoid of that tension is chasing fool’s gold.

Keep that in mind when you plan your life.