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“Everybody’s Got A Plan Until They Get Punched In The Face”

Mikey Tyson, intractability, and modernity.

Ted Bauer
3 min readFeb 12, 2024

Believe I initially wrote this around Thanksgiving of 2017.

This Friday is December 1st. We’re in a race to the end of the year, personally and professionally. Ideally the breathless 2018 “strategy road maps” (gag me) have already been written, but I’m sure at many companies, those meetings haven’t even commenced yet. Regardless of whether you’ve got your 2018 deliverables laid out on the deck already, I can tell you this: the end of the year, naturally, gets a lot of people thinking about plans. Gotta make some big plans for 2018. BHAGs. Hell, I might run a marathon (full not half), so I’m in on this too. December is mostly a time for awkward holiday parties, sweaters, time with family, rampant capitalism, and reflection/planning.

But we tend to think on planning all wrong.

Mikey Tyson!

The title of this post is a quote attributed to him, which has implications far beyond boxing.

Professional Example: You spend weeks/months having meetings on a strategic road map. All the stakeholders are aligned. Communication seems good. Then the price of an input widget goes up, or your COO is poached by a competitor. You had a plan. You got punched…

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Ted Bauer
Ted Bauer

Written by Ted Bauer

I write about a lot of different topics, from work to masculinity to relationships and social dynamics, I.e. modern friendship. Pleasure to be here.

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