Burning Your Bridges vs. Having a Backup Plan
By: Brian Kim - November 1, 2007
We’ve all heard the story of Cortez’s army and how they burned their bridges of retreat by burning their own ships when they landed in Mexico. General Cortez gave the order to burn the ships so that retreat would not be an option for his army. They would have to stand and fight the Azetcs. They would have to win or they would perish and of course, as history has shown, they won.
This example is often used to drive home the point that you should burn your bridges of retreat when you have a worthy goal in front of you. Go for it 100%. Don’t look back. Take the bull by the horns and charge forward. If your “ships of retreat” aren’t burned, then that option to always quit and go back to where you were before would always be in the back of your mind, hindering the release of your full potential and acting as a subtle saboteur (if you will) in the process as well. That’s the main idea behind the concept of burning your bridges.
People fear to take this course of action and it’s understandable because let’s be honest – if you look at it, it seems like a pretty extreme philosophy at first glance. Logically speaking, wouldn’t it be wise have a safety net, a backup plan if you will just in case? But by having that “safety plan”, wouldn’t that very course of action backfire on you by limiting your full potential? If Cortez’s army didn’t burn their ships, thereby in essence, leaving them with their own “safety plan”, would they still have fought as hard as they did without the ships? Would they have still defeated the Aztecs?
It’s an interesting question that’s easily debatable by both sides so with that being said, let’s take a closer look at the issue.
To gain a little more perspective on this issue, let’s use another example that illustrates the two ends of the spectrum.
Imagine you were going to walk the tightrope for the first time at a carnival. The tightrope was set up about 100 feet off the ground.
Wouldn’t it be foolish to walk the tightrope without a safety net at the bottom to catch you in case you fell?
Would it be wise to “burn your bridges” by having no safety net at the bottom and go on to walk the tightrope, thinking you can successfully walk it just because you applied the “burn your bridges” theory to it?
If so, you probably wouldn’t make it.
This is albeit, an extreme example, but it makes an important point and it may seem like I’m advocating the backup plan theory and discounting the burning your bridges theory here, but let’s stop for a second and explore the situation a little bit further.
There are people out there at the circus who do “burn their bridges” when it comes to walking on the tightrope. They walk with no safety net and they make it across just fine.
What’s the difference here?
It’s because they’ve trained for it. They’ve practiced it before, with safety nets. They’ve developed the skills needed to do it. They’ve researched and understood the physics behind it, just like Cortez’s army trained, practiced, and developed the skills and the knowledge they needed to engage their enemies in combat.
That’s the invisible thread that links these two seemingly polar opposite theories together.
Let’s see how this all applies to an issue that a lot of people deal with in real life today.
It’s the old “Should I quit my job to start my own business and go full bore (burn the bridges) or should I keep my job and just build my business on the side so in case it doesn’t work out, at least I still have a job to fall back on for financial reasons (backup plan)?
The logic behind quitting the job and focusing on starting your own business is that you would be 100% focused in terms of your time, energy, and money and if you had to make money to survive with your business, you would make it. You would be forced to and you would succeed because of that. You had no other choice. You burned your bridges and because you did that, you should succeed according to that theory.
The logic behind keeping the job and building your business on the side is that you would have more economic security and because you wouldn’t have 100% of your time, energy, and money focused on the business, it would take significantly longer to get your business off the ground and if you did manage to get it off the ground, but find that it doesn’t work out later on, at least in this case, you’re still secure financially rather than having no stream of income coming in at all.
The usual advice to this dilemma is to work on your business on the side while you work at your job and take the leap once you have enough cash flow coming in your business to cover the expenses you need.
But then again, there’s always that little hole in the theory that if you do have a backup plan, that’s evidence that you’re not committed enough to your goal and that you don’t fully believe you can do it and that will eventually bring about your inevitable downfall as well.
So what’s really the best way to deal with all this seemingly circular logic?
Looking back at the tightrope example, we see that those who do walk the tightrope without the safety net, in other words, those who have “burned their bridges”, have actually in the past, practiced with safety nets or “backup plans”, trained extensively, and developed the skills and got the knowledge they needed so they could successfully do it.
The same thing applies here.
You can “burn your bridges” by quitting your job and go on to work on your own business when you’ve practiced, trained, and developed the skills and the knowledge you need to be successful in your business.
But then the inevitable question will arise. Even if you didn’t have all those things beforehand, couldn’t you still pick all that up along the way out of sheer necessity to do so? Some will be able to, but the vast majority will not. But by staying as long as you can on the ship to train and to get the things you need to survive when you’re off it, there’s a better chance you’ll be better of without it.
If you pick up all the intangibles thing while on the job – training, skills, knowledge, and you save a little money too as well, it makes burning the ship that much easier because you already have all the things you need from it to survive without it.
That’s the biggest misconception people have when it comes to the whole theory of burning bridges. They don’t account for all the intangibles of practice, training, skills, knowledge, and experience that people have that will greatly aid them in their respective journey.
Will there be some who do burn their bridges in the fullest sense of the term, in the sense that they have NO practice, training, skills, knowledge, or experience, but still succeed in the end?
Yes. There will always be cases like that. Inevitably, somebody will always say they know so and so who just quit their job cold turkey and burned their bridges to start their own business and that they were successful in it without having any prior experience in business at all. There will always be a select few who will be able to do that but for every person who does that, there are hundreds of others who will not be able to do the same.
Know that before you do “burn your ships”, the more things you “learn” on the boat (training, skills, knowledge) and the more things you “save” from the boat (i.e – food, water, money), the more you will be able to weather the fear of losing the boat because you already got the very best out of it. That’s when you burn your bridges and go full bore toward your lofty goal.
When that time will be however, is all up to you.
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