Relying Too Much on Plan B May Ruin Your Plan A.
It’s good to have a backup plan in case your goals don’t work out in your career or life. However, spending too much effort figuring out the details of your backup plans can make it less likely that you will actually follow your first plan.
As the 99u productivity site explains, when you only have one plan to achieve a goal, you put all your efforts into it. If you have an easier backup plan, you may be tempted to ditch Plan A when things get tough in favor of Plan B. This idea was reflected in research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Pennsylvania:
Based on their findings, researchers Jihe Shin and Katherine Milkman reported that “while creating a contingency plan has well-known benefits [such as reducing anxiety about the future …], it also comes with a cost that should be weighed carefully.”
These new results lack a certain level of realism – productivity in an online word game is not equivalent to starting a new company or writing a novel. However, experimentation confirms a compelling intuition – that by drowning out your fear, a back-up plan can also extinguish your burning passion. Logic dictates that this is more likely to become a problem when your goal depends on persistent determination, and even more so for “antlers” whose success is much more dependent on luck – in this latter case, backup plans are a shrewd idea with no obvious disadvantages. …
Of course, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a backup plan. Just do your job proportionally. Spend more effort on achieving your core goals than developing backup plans. Make sure that the effort you put into your day-to-day work is not wasted just because you imagine what else you might be doing.