How many times have you made some very specific plans in your life and seen them go haywire? At least in my life, it happens too often. I will attempt to follow through with my plans only to be left disappointed because something came up, and I'm now busy doing other things instead of what I had really wanted to do.

Let’s start with a small example. There are days when I really feel tired and don’t really feel like doing anything. Those days, I think, “I will go home early today and have fun watching Netflix and sleep away to glory.” Trust me, these are the days when I am the busiest. It feels as if I don't even have time to breathe on such days, let alone finish my initial plans of relaxing. Usually, something comes up, and suddenly it's nighttime. This happens all too often, and nothing ever goes the way I want.

Has it happened to you? I can understand.

Let’s consider another classic example: You want to meet someone. That someone can be anyone, your teacher, your friend, etc. You make very specific plans as to how you want the meeting to go, what you want to say, how you want to present yourself, how you want to express yourself. You go there and see that the person you wanted to meet is either unavailable that day, or the person you expected to meet has come with someone else and all the plans suddenly become useless. The person is reacting exactly opposite of the way you expected them to, creating an aberration to your so-called plan.

But does this mean that you should not be making any plans whatsoever just because they don’t turn out the way you wanted them to be? My answer would be yes and no. From my personal experience, I have learned that it is much better to have vague plans rather than making very specific plans. I will explain what it looks like in a few minutes. But yes, other than making so called “vague” plans, we should also learn to lower our expectations a little bit. Just because we expect too much, things seem way worse than it actually is. So try to have realistic expectations that things aren’t always going to go your way. "My way or the highway" doesn’t really work in the real world.

Here's how to make vague plans: if you plan to go on a vacation, just plan the dates. That’s it. If you start planning everything from how your flight experience would be to how you would enjoy your stay and which hotels you would stay in and so on, you may get disappointed. Disappointed how? You may not get tickets to that particular place for that particular time. You can either get disappointed or start thinking about where else to go. So if you had a vague plan that there are some five places you would like to visit and then start crossing off them your list rather than just having one on it and then get disappointed later on.

There are people who decide on exactly which university to go to for their studies, which subjects they would like to study and so on but things don't really turn out the way they want.

It's important to have an open mind and "vague" plans.