A Master Plan

Last month in my remarks to the Rotman Commerce Women’s Initiative, I told 4 stories.
The 1st one was about rolling with the punches. Why? Because punches are inevitable.
After law school, my Master Plan was to be a big tax lawyer at a big firm. But I didn’t get an articling job at a big firm.
Instead I got a job at a small firm that had me doing all sorts of things including setting bail hearing dates for the firm’s criminal lawyer.
Not the Master Plan.
So two years later I jumped at the chance to join a big firm when it was hiring junior lawyers for a huge oil and gas deal.
Perfect.
Except that two years after that, the deal ended as all deals do, and the firm started to fire associates with the same speed it had hired us.
For reasons unknown, they didn’t straight up fire me – instead they offered me an alternative: join the wills and estate group
UGH.
Wills and estates?! I hadn’t even taken that class in law school.
Thanks, but no thanks, I was going to say.
Then my Dad reminded me that paying the rent came ahead of my Master Plan.
So I took the job.
This was the first of many times that life has demonstrated to me that a Master Plan is a work of fiction.
That it is nice to have a vision, but more important to pay the rent.
With time, I saw that the chance to go into wills and estates was a gift.
I loved the field. I became a partner, wrote books on the subject and a monthly column in the Calgary Herald, caught the attention of a bank looking for a wealth services executive.
My Master Plan would have me at this stage still practicing law, no Prairie Girl Bakery, very likely bored to tears.
My point is, often in life we won’t like reality but there it is, it’s reality. From there, everything depends on how we play the hand we got, not the one we didn’t.