Hello everyone and welcome to Developer Team. My name is Jonathan Cottrell. My goal on the show is to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective, and purpose in their careers. In today's episode, we're talking about the importance of having a backup plan. The importance of having a backup plan. This goes for your technical backups. It goes for redundancy, but especially it goes for situations where human error could cause a problem, which is almost every situation you face in your career, right? The likelihood that the issues that you face in your career are human error related, rather than purely technical, is very high. Okay, so we're talking about preparing for this specifically because of the risk and reward curves. Think about the last success that you had in your career. And we're going to look at both sides of the spectrum today, okay? The last success that you had in your career. How much benefit, how much action, how much effort did you take to get to where you are today? And how much positive momentum did that provide you in your career? For most people, successes tend to be incremental in nature. In other words, you deliver the last project on time. Most of the time, that's going to give you the opportunity to work on another project. You might end up getting a good performance review. You may end up making a little bit more in your salary. And this isn't inconsequential. It's not necessarily, you know, something to look down on. Incremental progress is progress nevertheless. But when we look at failures, and specifically when we look at failures that are uncaught, that we don't have any exception, any backup plan for, the possibilities for loss tend to outweigh the potentials for gain. What does this mean? It means that in the situation where you, let's take one project, right? In the situation where you make a significant mistake on one project, the potential for loss on this is very high. So let's imagine that the potential for gain again from that one project is going to gain you, a good performance review this year. You might get a five or maybe 7% pay increase, right? You get the opportunity to work on more projects. Maybe you get a little bit more responsibility, but overall it goes from one step to one step up. Most failed projects have a much longer negative tail than success projects have a positive tail. So in other words, if you deliver late or if the project is disastrous and you don't have a backup plan, you don't have any contingencies, you haven't figured out what do we do if we're late? What do I do personally in my career if I get laid off, right? These are all types of backup plans. The potential for loss significantly outweighs in the negative direction, the potential for gain, and the positive direction in the success state. So instead of getting a five to 7%, you know, pay cut, for example, it's very rare that something like that would happen. You may not get a good performance review, but that negative performance review is going to affect you in further future performance reviews. And the likelihood that you're going to get promoted, uh, that will follow you a much longer period of time. Right. It's much more likely that a bad project, especially bad performance review is going to follow you longer than the good performance review does. Right. The other very possible reality is that you put yourself in a, uh, selection as a pool, um, of people who may end up being considered for budget cuts, for example, right. But layoff, if you are, uh, you know, noticeably failing, right. Noticeably failing without a backup plan. So the criticality of a backup plan is to avoid the catastrophic curve that we're talking about here. Right. If you were to imagine, uh, like a graph where, you know, a number of successes, is correlated to some outcome you care about, right. Whether that's pay, uh, maybe the outcome you care about is responsibility or growth in your career opportunities given to you, freedom earned, whatever your outcomes are that you care about. And the success to outcome, positive outcome curve is probably one that looks mostly linear with a few bumps, right. Certain successes, certain strokes of luck, may have little jump ups in that, in that curve, but number of failures and potential negative effect goes significantly faster. Right. So we, we would look at this as probably the beginning or some kind of logarithmic, um, you know, uh, a logarithmic function where one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, negative effect or two negative, uh, or rather negative outcomes may result in, uh, a few bad effects. But as you pile those up, it goes much further, much faster and similar to the step ups in the, uh, success graph, you may have drop downs in the failure graph. So for example, a layoff might be a good example for that. There are certain catastrophic events also that you don't necessarily have control over that if you don't have a backup plan for, they have nothing to do with your performance. They have nothing to do with your choices as far as the actual failure case is concerned. But those events can cause major wipeout scenarios. This is what Taleb would call a black swan. It doesn't even have to be totally a black swan. It can just be something that you're not prepared for. Even in a situation where you feel like you're prepared for most things, a black swan could occur, and that's true for everyone. But the more that you prepare for these contingencies, the more likely it is that you can deal with, maybe not necessarily prevent every failure, but deal with the majority of failures. So that that curve doesn't happen. It may be that you have backup plans for your project failures. It may be that you have backup plans for your career. Maybe you've made decisions like purchasing insurance. This obviously is not the kind of show where we're going to give you recommendations on insurance or anything like that. But instead, the principle remains. The principle is that it's more important, most likely, for you to avoid catastrophic loss than it is for you to stretch yourself to try to get an incremental gain. Now, on the flip side, it's also very likely that as you stack up multiple positive outcomes, your backup plans will result in further positive outcomes. So it's kind of a flywheel effect. Right. The preparedness and your ability to respond to negative events will also increase the speed of that flywheel. Now, I'll leave it as an exercise for you to figure out how do you make that curve on the success curve? How do you make that go up faster or how do you how can you turn that exponential? Most likely, that's about placing a lot of bets. Right. And having a significant number of those bets. Where if it's incremental in progress, that's okay with you. But the bet has higher upside. Right. So there are ways to do that. But the critical takeaway here is it doesn't matter how many incremental gains you have. If you're not prepared for significant negative or adverse events, then one or two of those could wipe out all of the progress that you've made. Right. One or two could wipe out all of the incremental gains. And that's what we're going to talk about today. And that's what we're going to talk about today. And that's what we're going to talk about today. That you've created through individual successes. So focus on your backup plans. Always have a backup plan. Try to figure out how could this thing go wrong. Try to figure out what kinds of catastrophic things could happen. You could determine the likelihood of those. Right. You don't necessarily just use historical events for that. Try to imagine what is possible that could happen. Like theoretically possible. Not just demonstratively. Possibly possible. Could your startup get disrupted? Even though there's never been anybody else in this space? Of course it could. Right. Just because we don't have historical record of something happening doesn't mean it couldn't happen. So consider the catastrophic events that even though they haven't happened yet, they could. Right. This is the premise of things like life insurance. Even though you haven't necessarily needed life insurance, you will only need it once. If you do need it at all. So these kinds of ways of thinking. If you can hedge your efforts with very basic backup plans. Things like redundancy, for example. Things like thinking out in front of your career. Right. Be in front of your career at all times. The best time to start interviewing is when you're hired. When you're already working somewhere. Even if you're happy at that place. Interviewing is never a bad idea. Especially when you're secure. So these are the kinds of things that create resiliency in your career, in your life. I encourage you go identify places where if a catastrophe were to occur, you would experience one of those drop-off curves. And try to figure out what would the most basic version of a backup plan be. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. to this show right now, somebody listening will absolutely have one of these events occur at some point. I don't know who, and I don't know what it is, but it's up to you to be ready for that. So evaluate your various potentials for catastrophic events, and then put one, just one, and see where it takes you. It's very likely that you're going to feel a sense of relief from that. That's a nice emotional feeling, but also if it ever comes down to it, and you needed that backup plan, now you have it available to you. My guess is that if you do one, you're going to be excited enough to do another, and then another, and hopefully you'll have backup plans for most of your situations, especially your professional ones. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. If you enjoyed this episode, then if you're on YouTube, you can like, subscribe, do all of those things. 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