Getting where you're going, in spite of yourself

I often quote friend Roger. As he was going off to graduate school at Yale, people would ask him what he planned to do with his degree.
"That's what I expect Yale to teach me."
Scott Adams, in a recent blog post, raises a similar question and answer, whether it's better to sketch out a full path toward a goal or to take one step in the general direction to see what happens.
I've known several people who were able to set their life's goals early on, map out steps to the goal, get there, and enjoy where they landed. Those people are rare and, in my opinion, admirable. Knowing yourself that well from an early age is remarkable.
My ability to predict and then plan for the future is amusing at best. One of the standard questions in a job interview used be (dunno if they're still using it), "Where do you see yourself in five years?"
As I noted a few months ago, when I take any five-year slice of my life and look back at what I'd expected those five years to be, my record of prediction has been deeply, profoundly, and remarkably wrong.
The good news, however, is that, for most of my life, the outcome has been better than I'd expected, even as I've been deflected from what I'd originally set as my goal. Marriage, career, friendships, hobbies - in so many ways, I'd head in one direction, stumble, and start off with a new heading. My wife, with gentle good humor, can tell many stories about the cluelessness that I exhibited during the early part of our courtship. If I get any credit, it's in having the good sense to recognize better ideas as they come up and, without too much resistance, accept them.
People often point to President Kennedy's goal of putting a man on the moon and bringing him back safely by the end of the 60s as an example of how big goals need to be set. We should, then, probably not bring up his plans for Vietnam or the other events that, um, changed his plans.
The purpose of a plan, a former boss told us, is so that we can change it. Having a plan and changing it is very different from having no plan.