Caught COVID a few weeks ago.

I’d gotten all the vaccines & boosters. I’ve worn masks indoors and at public gatherings well after most people stopped. My kids are masked up at school almost the entire time. We weren’t perfect by any stretch, though, and our luck finally ran out.

Do I regret all the precautions having gotten it anyway? No, not for a second. My experience was relatively mild. One of my kids got it, and had similarly mild symptoms, and the other didn’t get it at all. Certainly a far cry from if we’d gotten it in 2020.

Here’s the thing – in business, sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes you get unlucky. You can’t always control the outcome, and sometimes some small bit of bad luck will be fatal, and sometimes everything will go wrong and you’ll miraculously be fine.

The only thing you can do is to try to be prepared for things. To take smart precautions. To try to mitigate risk as much as possible. And sometimes stuff just goes cattywumpus anyway. You can’t control everything. All you can do is mitigate risk and try to be prepared.

For me, having gotten vaccinated, having worked to minimize whatever exposure we *did* get – the result was that it was a mild experience, and I’m grateful for that. This is the same approach I did my best to take when at work – to anticipate the things that were coming at us, to try to prepare, to minimize risk, and maximize our flexibility and reactivity, so that we could change plans on a dime when needed.

And yeah – that may be COVID, that may be business. But it’s also almost everything. Be prepared, but also be flexible. Mitigate risk where possible. Assume disasters are inevitable. Work to prevent them where possible, but build in the resiliency and flexibility to deal with them when they happen.

If you think you can prevent or avoid all disaster… you’re in for a bad time. Which probably leads to a future post about ostrich optimism, and how much I hate working with people who believe “it’ll all work itself out”. 😐