The Plan Was Wrong. The Lesson Was Right.

What’s on my mind?

How we react when the plan changes.

Last week my family was on vacation, and as usual, I had a plan.

Not a loose plan. A real plan.

Each day had an itinerary. I had thought through drive times, activities, timing, and what would make the day go smoothly. Even the restaurants weren’t completely left to chance. Each night I looked ahead at where we would be the next day, checked reviews, looked at menus, and tried to reduce the chances that someone would end up tired, hungry, disappointed, or frustrated.

I planned for the trip to go well.

What I did not fully plan for was the part where things didn’t go according to plan.

That part always happens.

It happens on vacation. It happens in business. It happens in parenting. It happens when you are growing plants, raising worms, building compost, applying biology to a lawn, or trying to turn a small idea into something real.

You can prepare. You can think ahead. You can do your best.

Reality still gets a vote.

The biggest example from our trip happened the night before one of the days I had planned most carefully. One of the big reasons for the trip was that Leo wanted to see a platypus. I thought the platypus was at the zoo. I had already purchased tickets. I had already built the day around that visit.

Then, at about 9 p.m. the night before, we discovered the platypus was not at the zoo.

It was at the Safari Park.

Wrong park.

Wrong tickets.

Wrong plan.

At the end of a long day, with tired kids who needed to be getting ready for bed, I realized I had built an entire day around the wrong location. Internally, I went right where I often go when I make a mistake. I started calling myself an idiot. I started replaying what I should have done differently. I started attacking myself for missing something that felt obvious after the fact.

In the past, that frustration would not have stayed internal.

It would have leaked out.

Not always in some dramatic way, but enough that the people around me would feel it. My family would get the verbal bumps and bruises that come from being near someone who doesn’t quite know what to do with his own disappointment.

That is not fun to admit, but it is true.

This time was different.

When I finally told Denise, Jett, and Leo what happened, they didn’t pile on. They didn’t make the mistake bigger than it already felt in my own head.

They told me it was okay.

They reminded me that people make mistakes.

And they were right. We were lucky. We found out the night before instead of the next morning while standing in the wrong place.

The mistake still happened. The tickets had still been purchased. The plan was still wrong.

But the reaction changed the experience.

That has me thinking about the work I do with Iowa Worm Farm.

Because this is basically the whole job.

I can make a plan. I can test a product. I can build a compost system. I can feed worms a certain way. I can apply biology to a lawn. I can start an experiment with a hypothesis, measurements, and documentation.

Then reality shows up.

A plant doesn’t respond the way I expected.

A compost pile gets too hot or too dry.

A worm bin behaves differently than I thought it would.

A customer’s lawn has a limiting factor I didn’t fully understand at the beginning.

The soil does not care how confident I was when I started.

Neither do the worms. Neither do the plants. They respond to the actual conditions they are living in, not the version of the plan I had in my head.

That can be frustrating.

It can also be the best part of the work.

I think one of the biggest shifts for me, both personally and in the worm farm, is learning to stay curious when something goes wrong instead of immediately turning it into judgment.

There is a big difference between saying, “I failed,” and saying, “Something happened here that I need to understand.”

One shuts the door.

The other opens it.

That is the difference between shame and learning.

The most important work I have done in my own life has been learning to understand my relationship with shame. How quickly I feel it. How easily I believe it. How often a mistake becomes something bigger than a mistake in my own mind.

But mistakes are not the problem.

The problem is what happens when shame takes over.

Shame makes the lesson harder to see. It turns curiosity into self-attack. It makes a person want to hide, defend, blame, quit, or pretend the mistake didn’t happen.

But you can only see the lesson if you don’t spend all your energy attacking yourself for the mistake.

That is true in life.

It is true in soil.

It is true in this business.

When something doesn’t go the way I expected, the most useful response is not, “How could I be so stupid?”

The better question is, “What is this showing me?”

That question leaves room for growth.

A good plan still matters. I am not giving up on planning. Planning helps. Preparation helps. Thinking ahead helps.

But the plan is not the whole story.

The real story is what happens when the plan meets reality.

That is where the learning is.

That is where the growth is.

That is where the good stuff usually hides.

People make mistakes. Plans change. Things go wrong.

The mistake is not the whole story.

What we do next is.