Nothing to fall back on

What you call a backup plan can be a ticket to your own failure. Is it a backup plan? Are you improving your chances of success with it or are you giving yourself a way out; something to fall back on?

You don’t try your best when you have something to fall back on. A real backup plan gives you more ways to achieve the end results of your initial plan, and it improves your chances of success. It is not supposed to discourage you from trying your best, defeating the purpose of a backup plan in the first place. A backup plan is not supposed to encourage complacency and make you blind to opportunities when they present themselves. It should effect the opposite.

I realized this when someone asked me what I would do if I didn’t succeed at what I was doing in life. She termed “what I would do” as “a backup plan.”

The question got me thinking. I asked myself why a backup plan would come into effect after failure. Having a backup plan like that is another way to guarantee failure. It creates a reason for me to feel secure and not really try hard. It reduces my own self-confidence as well as the worth of what I am doing.

I saw no need to have a backup plan, if it sabotaged my current plan or deterred me from the vision.

In my mind, a backup plan was supposed to give me more options within the original vision. To find ways to improve my chances of succeeding at what I had set my mind to, and that was when it dawned on me: people mistake fallbacks for backup plans.