This episode focuses on the critical importance of having a backup plan, not just for technical redundancies but especially for situations involving human error, which are highly prevalent in one's career. The core argument hinges on understanding risk and reward curves, highlighting the disproportionate impact of failures compared to incremental successes.
Understanding Risk and Reward Curves:
- Successes are often incremental. Delivering a project on time typically leads to opportunities for more projects, good performance reviews, and modest pay increases (e.g., 5-7%). These are positive, but linear or slightly bumpy gains.
- Failures, especially uncaught ones, have a much longer negative tail. The potential for loss from a significant mistake or a disastrous project significantly outweighs the potential for gain from a success.
- A bad performance review, for example, can affect future reviews, decrease promotion likelihood, and follow you for a much longer period than a good one.
- Uncaught failures can place individuals in a pool for budget cuts or layoffs, leading to catastrophic curves where negative effects compound much faster, resembling a logarithmic function. One or two significant negative events could wipe out all accumulated incremental gains.
The Criticality of Backup Plans:
- Backup plans are essential to avoid these catastrophic negative curves and major "wipeout scenarios".
- This preparedness applies to project failures, personal career contingencies (e.g., getting laid off), and even events beyond direct control.
- It's crucial to prepare for theoretically possible catastrophic events, not just those that have historically occurred. Even "Black Swan" events or things you're not prepared for can cause major issues.
- Thinking like this (e.g., similar to life insurance, which you only need once if at all) encourages hedging efforts with basic backup plans, such as redundancy.
Benefits of Preparedness:
- The more you prepare for contingencies, the more likely you can deal with the majority of failures, preventing the catastrophic curve.
- Having backup plans can create a "flywheel effect", where your ability to respond to negative events actually increases the speed of stacking up further positive outcomes.
- Being proactive in your career (e.g., interviewing even when you're happy in your current role) builds resiliency.
Actionable Advice:
- Focus on what could go wrong: Try to figure out how things could fail and what catastrophic events are possible, even if they haven't happened yet.
- Identify vulnerabilities: Locate areas where a catastrophe could lead to a steep drop-off in your career trajectory.
- Implement a basic backup plan: The recommendation is to put just one in place this week for something that could catastrophically impact your career. This provides a sense of relief and ensures readiness if needed. Taking this first step is likely to encourage creating more backup plans for professional situations.
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