No Plan B
Your plan B can fail. Plan C, D, all can fail.
The biggest problem with plans is: You have to execute them.
You have limited energy and more importantly, limited attention. The easiest way to make money is to get a job. It is because someone has already figured out the things you need to do every day in order to take home a paycheck. If you have never figured out a path to income outside of getting a job, it’s incredibly difficult. Some people have a knack for it, but in general it’s pretty rare. Most businesses fail and its simply because you need to know what sells, build it, and then find customers and sell it. Each step of that process is extremely hard and full of tons of pitfalls, competition and new information.
Another problem is you have limited MOTIVATION. People pretend like this doesn’t matter. Willpower, whiteknuckling. Many people get from the cradle to the grave this way, but it often means you are fighting against your own emotion on a daily basis to get things done. You will most likely be less effective and you will be doing things you never wanted to do. Motivation is a funny thing. You can’t control it, but you can encourage it. Things I love are building products, solving math problems, making music, platform fighters. I can get pretty much lost in any of these things. Things I’m extremely good at but burn me out fast are talking with and organizing people, manual labor, executive assistance type roles. If I work on the former, I can pretty much show up, get lost in my day, and go home happy. If I focus on the latter, I am always stressed and burnt out.
Realistically, I’m very lucky to love engineering. Many people don’t and its a pretty stable career. Most people don’t know how things work and desparately need people to build and fix things. But lets say that was not an option and I just liked music and Super Smash Bros. You might argue that it would be better to get a project management role or executive assistanceship role. But, I actually love music so much that I excel at it. I excel not only in the creative aspect, but in performance, production, and so much more. I have managed teams in professional settings, but in a few months, I will casually learn significantly more about the music industry than I will when actively trying to skill up at manufacturing workflow or political strategy (two areas I worked in.)
The irony is that I’m worse at my plan B because when I wake up and have coffee, I am thinking about coding paradigms and Steely Dan solos, not Kanban.
That is the motivation I can’t control. It’s hard to pick the things I REALLY care about, and it’s hard to tell myself to “be in the mood” to do something inspired.
But there IS motivation I can control. Almost every guru has some five step plan you can buy. Most are junk.
Good Habits Bad Habits by Wendy Wood and The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp are must reads. The two things you are trying to do in life is remove all of the friction from the things you need to do, take small steps towards them, and allow yourself to trust your desire.
It sounds silly, but a lot of the work we do every day is towards little wins that are easy to accomplish but don’t matter much. Another large portion of things we do are just things that are natural responses to stuff that was thrown at us by our phone or the world. If you do not turn on a screen, you will hear much much less about the POTUS. I’m not saying politics aren’t important, but we’re tuned into them more for a sense of drama than we are in any way that is actually effective. Most of life is like this. You talk about the President because he’s on the screen you watch before you fall asleep, and the one you watch when you wake up. And maybe you didn’t sleep well because of the screen, so you get coffee, and now you’re thinking about the line and the creamer that was spoiled and the people out in the world being annoying and how everything is going to shit. But the reality is none of that matters. It’s just what is in front of your face and is a direct result of the decisions you made. You’re not a god. You can’t control everything. But if instead you leave your phone in a different room, go to bed, wake up, stretch, brew coffee, go for a walk around the neighborhood, notice how different the quality of your morning is. I’m not saying it’s perfect and you will be perfect forever, I’m just saying that your brain is really really responsive to whatever situation it’s in, so if you put it in a less stressful situation you will actually think about different things completely.
Plan B’s kind of drag you away from Plan A’s in this way. So ironically you’re doing something you care less about and it’s making it harder to go deep on the stuff you do care about.
Also, entire industries crash, go through boom and bust periods. Many plan Bs are stable until they aren’t.
The music industry is vast. There’s a significant amount of work there. Songwriter, mixer, masterer, performer, DJ, dancer, different record label roles, booker, manager. It’s called the record industry because there are jobs there. Its definitely a tough industry, frustrating, underpays in a lot of situations, but it is possible to make a living there. There’s no reason to not try if it’s something you really care about.
Plans take energy to execute. Often they’re extremely hard. Even the easiest plans can take weeks. The engineer joke about weekend projects is that they never take a weekend because something always ends up being harder than you expected. So if you have a plan A, and you’re banking on a plan B, and maybe a plan C or D, you now have the work of 4 people to do and now, by trying to be conservative, and hedge your bets, have many things going, many options, you’ve neglected the only real resource you have which is your time and motivation, and that can really only handle one or two things of that size max.
Its sort of a crazy feeling to dive into something and just have no plan B. It feels a bit irresponsible. Oh I’m writing this album or building this piece of software or starting this company or whatever it is you’re doing. But the reality is these things take a LOT of work. It’s also completely possible for you to focus on one thing for 6 months and take a look back at it and decide if you want to keep at it. We are allowed to change course. It’s more realistic to attempt to do something on a longer term, have a few review periods in there, and then decide if its working out for you later. You’re likely to have made a better attempt at it, and if that Plan B fails, you can then move on to your Plan C with your full attention.
The best financial advice I’ve gotten was to just put out the fires. Generally speaking, if you’re in crisis finacially, I will not guarantee this advice will apply to everyone, but a lot can be solved by slowing down and finding stability. Buses, cheaper grocery choices, stable employment, using the library instead of Netflix. No one likes doing this. I would love a nice car to drive to the Opera in but it is not available for everyone. Finding ways to spend less, do things for free, cut the cost on everything down as much as you can lays the safe foundation for taking larger risks.
It’s easier to follow your passion when you have a roof over your head. This is the argument of why a lot of “nepobabies” get to become artists: because their apartment loft in NYC is payed for by their parents, and their parent is having their friend over for dinner who also happens to be an art curator. Not that the system is specifically rigged in their favor (yet) but if they’re a talented artist because they have free time and resources to make art, then their mom can bully them into opening their Instagram page at dinner and “Hmmm. Wow that’s actually pretty good.” I’m not saying you can manifest the rich friends and family aspect, you’d be surprised how much time you can spend on things you like when you’re not chasing a clock, you’re not waking up to your phone, and your bills are paid.
The secret to not having a Plan B is to have your financial bases covered. Be less risky with money in your day to day life and stop second guessing that you are or are not allowed to have a Plan A.
Engineers get fired. Houses burn down. Cars crash. Airlines go out of business. All sorts of stable things fail.
It’s important to recognize that it’s extremely hard to get anything significant done. So do yourself a favor, make your day to day life easier so that you can spend your time enjoying life and working on things you care about.