The Perfect Plan

How amazing it would be to develop a perfect plan, follow which we could have a perfect result. Of course the assumption is that everything is controllable: you've included all the "variables" in the plan, find the right way to handle them, and no worries about uncertainties during the implementation. Experiments like this may be carried out in labs (although even the most strictly controlled experiment faces challenges such as contamination/spill-over), but too many omitted variables exist in the real world which makes a perfect plan in the real world almost impossible. As a result, the perfect plan evolves into an imperfect, sometimes even disappointing plan. You may want to describe it as a good experience/adventure years later, but at the moment when things go wrong, it's still not easy to handle.

A possible solution is to go for options that have lower probabilities of going wrong. For example, shop in branded stores with good return policy, go to a tourist attraction mentioned in "Lonely Planet"; or pick a major that can guarantee a job after graduation, and follow seniors' suggestions to avoid mistakes. But things can still go wrong no matter how high the probability of "being successful" is, and it does require extra efforts to get back to the right track, or to even develop a new track. In Tang Dynasty, a talented young man went to the capital Chang'an for an imperial exam, a qualify exam for government officials. He had prepared it for a long time and had never thought he would fail, which unfortunately happened. Frustratingly he went out drinking, where he met a dancing girl who he used to know. The girl recognized him soon and joked: "You're not a government official yet?" The young man wrote a poet as a response:

I left Zhongling ten years ago in drunkenness,
Now I met Yunying (the dancer's name) and her beautiful dance.
I haven't made my name, and you haven't got married,
It's probably we're not so good as others.

Well, he was wrong. He became a famous poet later. (That's how I got to know the poem above.) After the difficult time of seeing his failure in the original plan, he found a new plan of his life.

One can never find a counterpart in one's life to see whether his decision is right or not, or to figure out where the plan goes wrong, even twins rarely serve as a good case for comparative studies. However, it's quite normal to assume "if I had blahblah..." when facing troubles. When I'm frustrated by the job search in the bay area, I do doubt if I made the right decision to leave my comfort zone - quitting my "iron-bowl" job in China, and going back to school in a new country. But when I think of my vagrant experiences across the US in the past few years, everything looks so deserving, even the painful memory of staying up all night to finish reading hundreds of pages of papers or to write policy memos is rewarding. I could have followed my "perfect plan": slowly moved up in the bureaucratic hierarchy and retired with good pensions, however at that moment, my rational choice was to go for an alternative. I guess it's a trade-off: I lost a stable job, but enriched my life in unexpected places.

Maybe there is never a perfect plan. What I can do now is to enjoy the bitterness of changing, take advantage of my depression and produce some poems.

夜染繁花处，灯挑旧草庐。

青柏二三树，闲竹五六株。

已知春风早，恨将桃李误。

遥看苔阶冷，郁郁待日出。