Most of us spend our lives waiting for the perfect plan. The perfect explanation for our symptoms. The perfect protocol. The perfect moment when everything finally makes sense, and the path forward becomes clear. I want to tell you why that plan is the very thing standing between you and the life you’re after.

Last week, Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph stood before my son’s graduating class at the University of Rhode Island’s College of Business and said something that landed with the weight of a truth I already knew but had never heard said quite that way. He said, “The world doesn’t reward the people with the best possible plan. It rewards the people who are still standing when their plan falls apart.”

He wasn’t speaking to an audience of patients navigating chronic illness. He was speaking to a room full of business graduates. I heard it as an entrepreneur and as a health advocate, the way I always do.

Randolph grew up playing right field. And if you know baseball, you know that a right fielder’s most important job on almost every play has little to do with right field. The moment the ball is hit, you take off running to back up first base, to stand behind the first baseman in case the throw goes wide. In a typical game, he made that run thirty times. Almost every single time, it was a waste of effort. The ball was caught. The throw never came. But Randolph ran anyway, because he understood something that most of us don’t learn until much later: preparation isn’t about predicting where the ball lands. It’s about being there when it does.

He calls this backing up first base. I call it the foundation of every genuine health transformation I’ve ever witnessed.

Here’s what I mean. The people I work with who reclaim their health are rarely the ones who found the perfect plan on the first try. They’re the ones who kept showing up — to their kitchens, to their appointments, to their own curiosity about what their bodies were trying to tell them. Even after a dietary change didn’t work, a lab result was discouraging, and a new symptom replaced the one they just resolved, they kept running. And then, one day, the ball arrived there.

Randolph built Netflix on that same principle. The original idea was DVD rental by mail, not exactly a world-changing vision. Before that, he pitched personalized shampoo. Custom dog food. Bespoke vitamins. Most of it went nowhere. But he kept running. He kept trying the unlikely thing. And when the moment arrived that required him to be ready, he was there.

This matters deeply to anyone living with a chronic condition, because the dominant cultural narrative around chronic disease is built on the premise of the perfect plan. Find the right diet. Get the right test. Take the right supplement. Execute flawlessly. And when it doesn’t work — which it often doesn’t, at least not right away — the story we tell ourselves is that we failed. That our body failed. That health is simply not something available to us.