I’ve faced different kinds of struggles throughout my life, each of which taught me different lessons too. However, I feel like there’s one specific lesson that always comes with each struggle:
You can’t control everything.
And I learned that the hard way.
I don’t know if it was the perfectionist trait in me, but I used to be that kind of person who needed everything to come out as planned. And since I had high expectations, most of the time I'd rather handle things on my own. I rarely delegated things to people unless I really, really trusted them and the situation called for it. When things didn’t meet my expectation, I would beat myself up and wallow in negative feelings. I was so arrogant to think that I could control everything until life slapped me hard with its unpredictability.
One of the struggles that leave quite a big mark comes from my working days at the previous company. I was appointed to handle an ambitious project from one of our huge clients. Actually, this was not my first time being a project leader, but no past projects were as big as this so I was nervous and scared as hell. The workload was appalling and the deadline was tight. I made a thorough plan on how I would work on this and when to deliver it. At first, I was quite confident with my plan and thought that everything would finish well.
Oh, how naive I was. I can’t remember what exactly happened, but let’s just say I was so stupid not to consider other variables. I forgot there were things that I just could not control (i.e: sudden new projects, writers calling in sick, etc). And I didn’t have the heart to ask the team to work more because they were already crammed with heavy workloads, so I would handle more things than usual. To say it was hectic is such an understatement. When my superior asked me to meet to talk about the project, I knew I was going to get scolded. And, boy, was I.
It was… tough, to say the least. I thought I had already done my best, which I was sure I did, but why didn’t things come out well? I took it very hard. It crushed my confidence and made me question my competence, that maybe I wasn’t really good at this and all those times that I did well—it was all just pure luck. I was very stressed and maybe at some point I was burned out, but I didn’t have time to focus on myself because the project couldn’t wait. It still had to be delivered to the client.
Thank God it was all in the past, and it’s called the past for a reason.
I learned so much from that experience alone; how to manage time and handle projects better, to ask for help, and to let go of things I can’t control. Well, to this day I actually still consider myself as a perfectionist, in a way that I want things to come out as good as I expect. But now I have learned that I don’t have to do it alone, and it’s okay if the result doesn’t come out as planned as long as I’ve done everything in my power to work on it. And, God, it feels much, much more liberating.
There’s just something comforting about knowing that certain things are just out of your control. Once you’ve made peace with that fact, I swear your life will feel much lighter. And that’s the way I chose to approach everything in life these days: focus on what I can do—be it for work or personal matters. However, that doesn’t mean I’m not sad or disappointed when things don’t go well as planned, of course I still will be. But I think I’ve gotten better at letting go. And I seek comfort in the hope that maybe, maybe, there are better plans waiting for me in the future.
I believe this will all make perfect sense someday.
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