I once heard someone say if you want to succeed at something, you must go all-in and
“Burn the Boats”.
No plan B’s. Fully commit! At the time, I didn’t overthink it. I understood the metaphor and thought it was entertaining advice. However, after some thought, I realize it’s sound advice, sometimes, but it can be detrimental if followed for most things.
For example, marriage is a strong case where the “burning the boats” philosophy is appropriate. You don’t keep dating other people on the side in case your marriage doesn’t work out. You are fully committed, (traditionally). However, when it comes to career decisions, I don’t think it’s sound advice.
Careers are profoundly impacted by luck and randomness. Take the life of a salesperson, hard work, to say the least. If you lined up tenured salespeople and asked them if they would prefer to be lucky or good in their job, which do you think they would prefer? As a former salesperson, I know I would answer lucky. However, the difference between the salespeople that are tenured and the salesperson that doesn’t survive is that the tenured salesperson understands that hard work is still required. It’s like a quote from Old Man in the Sea, and I am paraphrasing here,
“I would rather be lucky than good, but I will be prepared for when luck should decide to arrive.”
See, the life of a salesperson is about being great at your craft and trying to create right place, right time encounters. In other words, being on the right side of randomness. Some salespeople fall to the fate of being on the wrong side of randomness and pick a new career. Most of the time, these people didn’t spend enough time learning their craft and understanding the domain they play in.
What I am saying is that sometimes it’s appropriate to burn the boats and others times it is not. When deciding when its an effective strategy, I believe a crucial metric to consider is survival. Live to fight another day. By burning the boats in highly volatile environments, we become incredibly vulnerable. Therefore, when a random turn of events inevitably happens, that is not in our favor; it can instantly take us out of the game.
Simply follow the wise advice of the Old Fisherman, with an added twist.
“Be prepared for when luck decides to arrive, but be smart enough to survive being unlucky”
