There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly

"He who fails to plan, plans to fail."

Remember back to our childhood, the old nursery rhyme about the elderly women who swallowed a fly. It's unknown why she designed to devour the insect. All that is documented is the simple fact: she did.

"I don't know why she swallowed the fly."

In our lives we often take on projects that are riddled with little flies. They are problems that creep up, causing problems upon problems. How we react to those issues often is how far that project will progress.

If we ignore the flies, we can often stamp them out with a well thought out plan. Buy a fly swatter or hang some fly catching tape.

Instead, we often do something all together foolish. We compound the problem. We go with a reaction rather then preparing to act.We don’t step back and survey the situation.

“I know an old lady who swallowed a spider.”

We take on another problem. Something we think will be a quick remedy to the previous dilemma. However, instead of fixing our earlier conundrum, we now create more problems. We swallow a bird, cat, dog, goat, donkey, cow and horse hoping something will quickly work.

The project, in which we ran into a small, fly of a problem could be completed by this point if we stopped and thought through a plan of action instead of going off the cuff. We, sadly, kill the project in the end due to a poor plan.

This song is really a life lesson if you think about it. Plan your actions and you will come out on top. Doesn’t mean whatever you plan will be a success, but it won’t die due to our own foolish inability to organize!

What ways have you “swallowed a fly” in the past? How did you attempt to fix the problem? Did it work?