Do you believe in having a plan B

[Greg Raymond]

Do you think that having a plan B means you believe your going to fail with plan A

[Jim K.]

I believe that there is a small number of people who succeed in difficult things who indeed hold the belief that, "Having a Plan B means you believe you're going to fail with Plan A." There is something to be said for the quality of fire lit under your a$$ when operating without a Plan B.

I also concurrently believe that many people who do not allow for the possibility of failure in their lives are suffering from a cognitive dissonance and when they do fail, the failure breaks their minds and they rarely fully heal in the broken places.

I believe consistently successful people have a dark and secretive cynical part of themselves that knows when they're cheering themselves on in a limited way to complete a difficult task and when they're lying to themselves. They are therefore able to deploy a kind of limited schizophrenic mindset in their working lives to push themselves a fair bit past what others would consider normal limitations.

I believe autobiographies of success are not to be trusted. Nobody ever admits unforced to doing very bad things, and very bad things very often lie at the dark heart of many varieties of success. How many times have you heard a flag-waving loud-n-proud Murica-Murica chanter admit that this foundations of this country firmly rest on two of the greatest crimes against humanity in the history of the world, the genocide of the Native Americans and the African slave trade?

I take deep issue with the two stories that are usually used to discuss the philosophy you're talking about: Alexander the Great burned his boats after sailing up the Hellespont into Persia and Hernán Cortéz burned his ships after landing in Mexico. Both of these leaders did this to convince their followers to toe the line, not to convince themselves.

Survivorship bias is, as Wikipedia describes it, "The logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not." There's an awful lot of survivorship bias in discussions about success.