When I grow up, I want to be…
These are the words that initiated the desire to devise a plan for our futures. As school progressed, we were taught how to use a planner and required to determine our next step after we received a high school diploma.
Plan your major, plan your career, plan your life – all at the ripe age of 18. 
Spoiler alert: life rarely follows your plans, no matter how carefully laid out and thought through they are.
Harry Styles’ net worth is estimated at about $120 million, but his music career was not included in the original plans he had for his life. According to Capital FM, Styles planned to be a physiotherapist, a teacher or a florist. At his X Factor audition in 2010, he told the judges that he planned to attend college, had an array of interests to pursue and, at the time, he was working at a bakery in his hometown.
Despite Styles auditioning with a solo career in mind, in 2010, the boy band we’ve all become familiar with formed: One Direction. This group propelled Styles’ life in one direction he never planned.
When the group split in 2016, he once again altered his life plans and was delivered the chance to launch the solo career he originally desired.
Something none of us planned: the world shutting down in 2020 and everything that followed it. But we found our way through it, we didn’t have a choice. If we were able to push through that mess, why don’t we believe we can conquer the other times our plans are obstructed?
Just because it is not laid out in the plans we make for our lives, does not mean it is not meant for us.
I planned to graduate early from the school I chose as a high school senior. I would receive a bachelor’s degree in finance, prepare for the LSAT, take the LSAT and go to law school.
I also planned to study in Italy for a semester, remain a student-athlete for four years, find the “love of my life” and never return to Mandeville.
I’m writing this in my childhood bedroom…in Mandeville. I have not found the “love of my life.” I am no longer a student-athlete. I never studied in Italy. I will receive a bachelor’s degree in mass communication from a school I didn’t choose as a high school senior, and I am entering my fifth year of college.
I did not plan for any of this, but it has proved to be better than anything I could have planned. The unplanned moments are some of the best. 
If we become so fixated on the plans we have for ourselves that we close the door for other opportunities, how will we ensure our plans are the best ones out there?
Do not stop planning out your life, truthfully, never stop planning. But accept that plan A may fail, or plan Z may be better than the ones before it. Just because you have not planned for something does not mean it will not bring splendor into your life.
Lauren Madden is a 22-year-old mass communication senior from Mandeville.