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I don’t let anyone else pack my backpack for me. It’s nothing personal, it isn’t even a trust issue. I’ve just learned from experience that you don’t get what you expect, you get what you inspect.
When it comes to packing my bag, I like things in a certain place. I know what I want to take with me. And when I do the packing myself, there’s only one person to blame when I don’t have or can’t find something that I need — me. Inspecting gear to make sure that you have everything you need, and nothing you don’t, is called shakedown.
And you shouldn’t perform shakedown only on packs. You should apply this to every area of your life. In business, you don’t get what you expect, you get what you inspect. If you’ve ever worked as a supervisor, you already know this. If you expect your employees to simply provide what you need, you will be sorely disappointed. Even when laboring with best intentions, miscommunication and misunderstanding make it easy for the end result to be far from expectations.
In relationships, you get what you inspect, not what you expect. No matter how much you care, if you don’t inspect the situation — by talking about it — things will start to go wrong. I have learned from experience that without good communication, you probably won’t end up on the same page.
As you’re working toward your goals, if you don’t inspect your progress, you probably don’t know how your daily actions actually stack up. You don’t have to sit and obsess over every little detail, just review what you’ve been working on, and how it has — or hasn’t — helped you get closer to success.
This doesn’t have to be an hours-long review. Just spend a little time here and there inspecting what you’re working on, whether it’s a goal, a relationship, or even packing your backpack. You don’t get what you expect, you get what you inspect. Don’t let this turn into a stalling tactic, or procrastination — that’s easy enough to do.
Just make sure that you inspect your life every so often. Be brutally honest and make sure that you’re still on track. Trust me — it’s a lot easy to make small course corrections every so often as opposed to big ones later on down the road.