No Plan B
Here’s a tip to help you achieve your goals.
Andes Mountains
Here’s a tip to help you achieve your goals.
No Plan B. Commit to succeed.
If you remove all options but one, and focus all of your effort and energy towards it, you are committed to succeed. Or you die trying.
Sound extreme? Here’s three examples from history that reinforces this strategy of committing to succeed.
In 334 BC, Alexander III of Macedonia invaded Persia to begin a military campaign that would eventually earn him the name for which he is most well known - Alexander the Great.
This started with the crossing of the Dardanelles with 120 ships carrying his troops.
The Persian forces of 40,000 - 100,000 at that battle significantly outnumbered his 18,000 troops, making it a daunting task for the Greek army on foreign soil.
As the story goes, upon landing on the Persian territory, Alexander gave the command to “burn the ships”. This removed the option of retreat. When asked how they were to return home, Alexander allegedly said, “We go home in Persian ships, or we die”. With no plan B, Alexander and his army won that battle and went on to defeat the Persian empire.
In 1972, a flight from Uruguay to Chile crash landed in the Andes mountains. Of the 45 onboard, 33 survived the crash, however this number diminished to 16 over the course of 72 days due to the lack of food, medical supplies and cold weather clothing.
A rescue mission ran for 8 days but was called off as it was believed that survival was not possible in the harsh conditions, where nightly temperatures plummeted to minus 30 degrees Celsius.
After 2 months on the mountain, Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa decided to seek help as they believed they would die if they did not get themselves out.
As Parrado told Canessa, “We may be walking to our deaths, but I would rather walk to meet my death than wait for it to come to me.”
With no map, no compass and no climbing experience, they climbed for three days from the crash site to a mountain ridge and then trekked for another 7 days into Chile before finding help.
With no plan B, Parrado and Canessa overcame the impossible and saved themselves and the remaining survivors.
In 2003, Aron Ralston was canyoneering alone in the remote Bluejohn Canyon in Utah, USA.
Whilst climbing down a slot canyon, a suspended boulder was dislodged and trapped his right hand against the canyon wall.
He tried for three days to free his hand, but was unable to do so.
He had not told anyone of his hiking plans nor had any way of calling for help, so he then decided that the only way to escape was to amputate. He did not have the tools to cut through the bones of his forearm, so he gave up on this plan.
After running out of food and water on the fifth day, he carved his name, date of birth and presumed date of death into the sandstone canyon wall, as he did not expect to survive the night.
As he tried to stay warm, he began hallucinating, and had a vision of himself playing with a future child whilst missing part of his right arm.
This gave him the belief that he would live, so the next day, Ralston followed through with the amputation and was able to free himself. He later said that if he had not done it, he would have died in the canyon.
Extreme? Yes. Did they succeed? Yes. Despite being faced with death, being committed to succeed and having No plan B worked for the people in these examples.
Whilst we are unlikely to face challenges with such high stakes, the principle is the same.
Remove all options so you can focus on a single option. Give this option 100% of your effort and energy and you will find a way to succeed.
No Plan B. Commit to succeed.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Granicus
https://ableebenezer.com/blog/2015/3/26/burn-the-ships-chapter-one
https://medium.com/@bengochberg/burn-the-boats-dda17c2f751b
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguayan_Air_Force_Flight_571
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aron_Ralston
Photo by Sebastián Silva on Unsplash