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Is Having A Plan B All It’s Cracked Up To Be?
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How good and detailed should your Plan B be before it risks usurping your main plans?
In the military world, it’s perfectly normal to have a backup or contingency plan, a Plan B as it’s otherwise known. The United States has a contingency plan in place in case a military conflict erupts in Venezuela; the Israeli military, for strikes on Iran; the United Kingdom for military intervention in Zimbabwe.
If the military, in its constant state of preparedness, needs to be ready to tackle conflicts we haven’t even bothered to imagine yet, shouldn’t we everyday folk also have a backup plan ready to implement should our primary plan not pan out as wished?
I’d argue that we should . . . for the small potato stuff. If your favorite Italian restaurant is overbooked the night you intended to go there, you’d have an alternative in mind. If the country you’re intending to visit has had its main international airport shut down by protesters, like what happened in Thailand at the end of November 2008, then it’s really convenient having a Plan B option ready to roll.
But what about the big stuff? Is with worthwhile devising Plan B’s for those, too?
What do I mean by “the big stuff”? Those are life-changing events: your choice of romantic partner, your choice of work, the type of life you want to lead.
I had a friend in childhood whom I’ve since lost touch with. We’ll call him Stu, which isn’t his real name. During high school and college, he had a mostly on again, sometimes off again, relationship with his best friend’s younger sister, Darla. Stu got interested in juggling and met a fellow juggler five or six years his senior named Eunice. He told Eunice he really had strong feelings for her, but hey, you only live once and he wanted to see how his relationship with Darla played out first. If things didn’t work out with Darla, he told Eunice he’d consider shacking up with her as his Plan B. No extra credit given for guessing Eunice walked.
Stu is the exception rather than the rule in that he eventually did marry Eunice anyway. Darla refused to relocate to their hometown so that Stu could assume his lucrative place in the family business. With the Darla relationship played out in full, he continued to run into Eunice at juggling events and was able to win her back. Warning: don’t attempt this at home! No sane person would agree to wait around while his or her love interest explored more highly ranked choices first.
What about with a choice of occupation? Wouldn’t it be prudent to have a Plan B here? One’s choice of work, one could argue, is even more important than choosing a spouse. Realize you picked the wrong spouse after ten years, just get a divorce. Realize you picked the wrong vocation after a decade, and you may find you’re entering the labor market with skills only suitable for doing more of the same sort of work. The work we decide to do largely guides the direction of our lives. A person pursuing a career as an international journalist will live a very different life than a used car salesman or a doctor. If you decide to start your own company, whether it succeeds or fails, that choice brings about a very different way of life than if you’d chosen to work as a bank teller.
To be perfectly clear, most of us don’t need a backup. We don’t try to become doctors when we know we’re not smart enough to get into medical school. I actually know someone who couldn’t get into medical school. He did have a Plan B but it wasn’t so far off from his Plan A: he opted for optometry instead of ophthalmology. We know what our talents and interests are and we opt to do something we’re able to practice somewhere. Even if we possess little natural or acquired talent in the field, nowadays some school will accept us and award us a degree. I knew a girl who majored in engineering in university. She had no aptitude for it and almost flunked out, but she still got a job in it. Another guy was able to practice dermatology because he obtained his medical degree in the Caribbean. For most choices of livelihood, it’s simple enough to practice without crafting a Plan B.
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The Baker’s Dilemma
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What to do if your job brings you no joy or what you love to do is something you can’t do well enough?
How many of us have ever been told to do what we love and the money will follow? Since time began, this cliché must have been spouted as often as “just be yourself.” Too bad both pieces of advice only work in select circumstances.
If what you love to do is accountancy, plumbing, or teaching, then doing what your love should yield some kind of payoff. A love of the work will bring greater enthusiasm to the job, more clients, and a greater livelihood. But be forewarned: the extent of the greater payoff will be determined more by the type of work you choose than your enthusiasm. If I am bright enough to get into the University of Toledo’s medical program and wind up an unenthusiastic general practitioner, while you’re much brighter and attend Harvard’s linguistics program but pursue a career as a passionate high school teacher, I’m going to be taking home the larger paycheck, a much larger paycheck I might add. I know people who went to mediocre law schools and got positions at marginal firms. Nevertheless, they earn more money their first year out than a very bright and multi-talented friend of mine, who has an Ivy League Ph.D. degree and has worked as an assistant professor for almost ten years.
Enthusiasm will help a plumber become a more likable plumber, a professor become a more likable professor. Likability may at some point translate into greater prosperity, but I say that with great reservations. When you were in high school, did the more likable teachers earn more money than the ones with dispositions similar to a wet towel? You already know the answer. Likability had nothing to do with remuneration. High school teachers are paid according to their degrees and their tenure. That’s it. If they’re affable, it’s a bonus – to their students. It doesn’t translate into a higher income. Being enthusiastic only has a chance to reap you greater rewards when you’re in a job that’s not based entirely on a pre-negotiated salary. An enthusiastic doctor or salesman, for instance, stands to attract more clients, and thus, more income.
But, as already stated, the profession you go into has a greater bearing on your income than your enthusiasm. In the real world, it’s difficult to think of enthusiasm as entirely separate from your job. You might be the most enthusiastic teacher within a thousand mile radius, but if you were suddenly forced to dig ditches for a living instead, could you still summon that same enthusiasm? The degree of your enthusiasm depends, in large part, upon how satisfied you are, both with your current living situation and your prospects for the future.
This explains why everyone with the necessary aptitude does not become a lawyer or a surgeon or a general manager of a hotel. Instead, they choose to offer new age dance classes or teach yoga or own a scuba diving shop in some tropical locale. It might seem easy to tell yourself you could work X number of years at a high flying respectable job, just because it pays very well, but if you’re not that excited about it, life becomes less meaningful and summoning the energy to go to work another day turns into an ordeal. I’ve met plenty of people who abandoned superb paying jobs to pursue a life more to their own making, a life filled with more enthusiasm. I’m sure you have as well.
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Acting The Way To Fame And Fortune . . . Or Failure
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Whether you're laughing or crying can largely depend on being in the right place at the right tim
Live in Los Angeles for more than a week, and you’ll quickly notice that everyone seems to be an aspiring film or TV actor. Every time I’d go to my gym for a work out, I’d overhear people talk about the roles they auditioned for or thought they might get. Probe further, you’d find out that some had shot a long forgotten TV movie or had a blink-or-you’ll-miss-it part in a major motion picture, probably as an extra. There was only one man at my gym who most people would’ve recognized from the variety of parts he’s done, both on TV and in film, although very few would know him by name.
I have a lot of respect as well as disrespect for TV and film actors. To set the record straight, I have no respect for most aspiring actors. When I lived in Los Angeles, I was enrolled in an acting class for a short spell. Not everyone in the class, like myself, professed to be there to make it as a professional actor, but most of them did. At the start of class, they’d shout upbeat statements like “Next year it’s me you’ll be seeing on must-see TV!” Each week, we were given a choice between coming in with a prepared scene and having the acting teacher critique it or showing up with nothing and being randomly assigned a cold reading. In case you’re not familiar with the world of acting and auditions, a cold reading is the delivery of scripted lines without any prior rehearsal. There is a definite skill to this, namely in the auditioning process, and some classes are devoted entirely to learning how to do cold readings well. Our class, however, was not one of them.
In the beginning, I endeavored to come in every week with a scene, fully memorized. Cold readings are all well and good, but in order to become a better actor, you have to polish your acting. That means getting out there on stage and acting in front of an audience and having your peers and teacher review you. This also means doing some actual work outside of class time. Usually, scenes were done with a partner, so you had to schedule time(s) to meet outside of class to rehearse. That’s a glimpse of the real world of acting. Any real acting job would require rehearsal time off the set.
My scene partners never bothered to memorize their lines or wouldn’t schedule time to rehearse or just plain wouldn’t show up in class the day we’d agreed to do the scenes. Eventually, I just gave up and did cold readings like almost everyone else. Soon after, I quit the class in disgust when I realized that most of my fellow students weren’t serious about acting, and I’d lost all respect for the teacher. These are the “actors” I have no respect for.
And then there are the actors who attend classes, study for scenes, and go on painful audition after audition. It’s not an easy life. You might be the next Laurence Olivier or Meryl Streep in the making, but if you don’t look right for the part, another actor from the inexhaustible pool of Brando aspirants will be hired. Especially for commercials, it doesn’t really matter if you have any acting talent.
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