Quote of the Week...from Yogi Berra

Make a game plan and stick to it.  Unless it's not working.                      ---Yogi Berra

Yogi Berra was a Hall of Fame catcher and fantastic hitter for the New York Yankees during my early childhood when they were tearing up the baseball world as a fixture in the World Series from year to year, winning several of them along the way.  Later on he tried his hand at managing with mixed results.  What many remember him the most for, however...besides his many Yoo-Hoo TV commercials...was his sense of humor and ability to twist the English language like a pretzel, creating ludicrous contradictions in many of his sayings, like "Ninety percent of the lies they're telling about me aren't true" or "I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous".  Sometimes, though, he would come up with something that for most sounded ridiculous, but upon thinking about it a little would actually contain some profound wisdom...like the above quote, for example...

Yogi was a baseball man and it's natural that he would term advance strategizing as "a game plan", and in sports as will as other endeavors it only makes common sense to know up front what you're going to do before commencing with it.  There will almost always be a few bumps at the start...but if your strategy is well thought out it's probably in your best interests to stick with it.  But in competitive environments the opponent not only has his own game plan, but is also adjusting to yours in order to render it ineffective.  Still, even without an adversary to throw a monkey wrench into all your well-laid plans, the pervasive nature of chaos as it can overtake any undertaking (ooh, that's sounds like something Yogi might say) demands that tactics and priorities must change along with the often-confusing changes going on around.  Besides, in a game or a project, you only have so much information to start with...the flood of input soon into it can be daunting and it's probably a good idea to stick to your guns until you can adequately process it all.  But if it's become clear that your strategy is a complete exercise in futility, why not then ditch it and try something new?  Yogi, you never let me down with your wisdom...