How to meet your goals even if plan A doesn’t work

If you want your goal enough then you’ll find a way

Robert Drury
3 min readSep 28, 2020

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about a quote from Claire Cook

“If plan A doesn’t work, the alphabet has 25 more letters …

204 if you’re in Japan.”

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Why this quote sums up perseverance?

I like the simplicity of it.

We draw out our plan A with the aim of helping us get to our goal, with actions and milestones, but sometimes we don’t achieve the result we want.

That’s why we have a plan B.

But let’s be honest, plan B might not work out either, but the thing to remember is that our goal still remains our goal.

Why should we give up on our goal, just because plan A and plan B haven’t worked out.

In reality there are many more ways we can go about achieving our goals, and we shouldn’t be limited by an initial failure.

And it doesn’t matter what those goals are.

Whether it’s becoming a product manager, selling a painting, saving for a rainy day.

You want proof?

It was on the 1,010th attempt when Colonel Sanders sold his chicken recipe, at the age of 62. There are now $25billion worth of sales each year in the KFC chain.

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It took Rovio six years, and 51 games failures to come up with the winner that was Angry Birds. They have now had 500 million downloads, more than 266 billion levels played and 400 billion birds shot.

James Dyson, took 15 years, and 5,127 prototypes to reach the successful first version of the Dyson vacuum cleaner. His business now as 12,000 employees around the world, manufacturing not just vacuum cleaners, but hand dryers, cooling fans, washing machines and more.

So I’m going to keep trying

I’ve tried plan A.

Tried plan B.

Robert Drury

Helping people kick start their product management career with product coaching, job application prep, and product resources at gettingstartedinproduct.com