They say it’s not about how many times you fall down but how many times you get back up.
They say that, but we don’t do that much training for getting back up. Most of our training is spent trying not to fall down, right?
I have a hard time training to get back up. For one, I’m not a natural planner. For two, whenever I start to think about the contingency plan, it rubs me the wrong way. Planning for failure feels an awful lot like planning to fail. I’m typically more of the mindset to not make any backup plans with the – mostly misguided – notion that it’ll keep me more committed to the first plan. Sink the ships, Cortez style.
So for instance, this month, we’ve been subtracting one item each day, getting rid of one personal belonging each day of the month. When I started this, and you can look back at the original post to confirm this, I detailed what I’d do, just like I did just now, explaining that I’d get rid of one thing each day of the month of February, blah, blah, blah. What I didn’t do, though, was describe what I’d do if I failed to do that. If I missed a day, would I catch back up by getting rid of two items the following day? What if I missed a week?
Now, 19 days into it, I’ve fallen behind. I’ve defaulted to the “catch back up” method I just described. I was behind three days, so today I got rid of three things to catch myself back up. This way, at the end of the month, I’ll still have gotten rid of a total of 28 items.
I’m walking through this process, not so much to talk about the Subtraction Experiment, but more to highlight the need to specify what to do if I fail.
Just off the top of my head…
- What do I do if I miss a day posting here?
- What do I do if I miss a day washing our dishes?
- What do I do if I forget to track which days I’ve taken a lunch? What if it goes so long that I can’t accurately recall what happened?
These are just a few examples where I’ve failed to create contingency plans. Instead, by default, I’m relying on my own intuition and decision-making ability once I’ve already failed.
Just writing that makes no sense. I’m relying on my own intuition and decision-making ability once I’ve already failed. ONCE I’VE ALREADY FAILED.
How crazy is that? It’s like the classic my dad always said about driving home late at night: “You can’t make decisions then on whether or not you’re going to close your eyes halfway to give them a rest. You have to make those decisions before you’re even tired, way before you get in the car. If you’re already falling asleep at the wheel, you’re not in the right frame of mind to make decisions.”
And yet, how often am I doing just that because I’ve failed to explicitly state the backup plan?
