You won’t always have control over your situation. Make a plan and develop contingencies, but accept sometimes things will be beyond your control.

John had a plan for selecting the best contractor. He had selected that contractor, but all for naught. As Robert Burns said many years ago – “the best laid schemes of mice and men oft go awry.”

This will happen often, more often than you expect and more often than you like. There are multiplicities of forces at work on a project, some are obvious, and some are more insidious. You may never know them all, so try to anticipate all you can, but accept that you cannot know or control everything.

To paraphrase Reinhold Niebuhr: Change the things you can, accept those you can’t change, and have the wisdom to know the difference. Not much more to say. Not as easy as it sounds, still it’s a valuable lesson to learn. You don’t have absolute control.