Falling in Love with Plan A

13 Sep, 2025

For the past 2 years, one of the qualities that made me most talented at my job was how rigorous I was at developing a Backup Plan. For anything that mattered, I ensured we knew at what point in time we would declare failure and switch modes into our plan B or even C. In one meeting I famously said "hope is not a plan" as we discussed our aspirations for the trajectory of our project.

In many ways, I am very proud of that part of myself and the specific way that I was able to carry my team through that project. Entering a project that was statistically very likely to fail, and being able to confidently tell a team that I knew we would succeed was powerful for me, and set the tone for the group towards a determined optimism about the outcome.

This past week, I encountered a very different part of my psyche: unprepared, devastated failure.

Specifically, I spent about 12 hours on the expensive and very physically demanding job of installing gym flooring only to discover it needed to be removed and then removing it 1 week later. ¹ It's hard to say how much of where I am now is burnout from my last job (or more appropriately, a fatigued set of project management muscles that really need a long rest) vs how much of it came from miscalculating risk vs something closer to the title of this blog post but regardless of exact variables I did not have a backup plan. I spent most of the week between the installation of the floor and removal very anxiously waking up early worrying that it would need to be removed. The anxiety clouded my brain, making it very difficult to create the backup plan at all -- I truly did not know how I would get the flooring out considering I couldn't carry it alone.

Yes, I was tired, and yes, I'm a new business owner with a limited budget, and yes, researching flooring for months simply does yield decision fatigue at a certain point, but something bigger and more beautiful happened that I don't want to ignore. When we finally finished the installation, I was overcome with a larger-than-expected wave of emotion. Looking at the gym, with the floor in, my mindset shifted from "can this career switch work" into "I am a personal trainer, and this is my gym." Almost immediately, I started thinking longer term -- 3 months out, 3 years out -- and imagining what my life and work would look like. The flooring was literally the groundwork of that shift.

As days passed and the mats continued to off-gas so intensely that the entire house was beginning to smell, I desperately tried to think of anything that could be done other than removing them not just for the labor required, but for the backsliding from Future Thinking back to "How will this work?" -- I had fallen in love with Plan A.

It had been a long time since I felt this way, and it was devastating. In my old work context, I never loved Plan A, because it was just a work project that needed to be completed. In fact, ever since 2020, nearly every trip or major plan I've made I've made sure there's a plan for what I can do if I were to get covid and need to quarantine somewhere. Creating a Backup Plan had become so regular that I had forgotten what it felt like to put my whole heart into Plan A and either feel the immensity of that path or the heartbreak of losing it. ²

On an excellent episode of Esther Perel's podcast Where Should we Begin, Julia Samuels says "Love and loss, life and death. We can't have one without the other. Is the deal. It is the contract we are all born into." as she and Esther explore the deep importance of the erotic in our experience of the world even when the world is profoundly full of grief. As I developed the muscle that always knew how to create the backup plan, I allowed the muscle of Hope and some of the muscles of Awe, Curiosity and Love to atrophy. It's true - Hope itself is not a plan, but it's also not synonymous with chaos or blind optimism. It's a certain kind of lust for life, it's a muscle, it's a force that can propel the whole body to bolder plans that These Times call for. Hope, Yearning, Curiosity are all things that take risks. Hope doesn't hedge.

And even with this Hope and this love for where I'm heading, this isn't a "leap of faith." This is a slow and tapered transition, paced out over months and propped up by strong community connections. In every failure and every success so far, I've been completely amazed (and deeply emotionally moved) by how my close people make impossible things possible. ³ When I feel my close ones cheering me on, and investing in my success, I remember why I'm in love with my Plan A. I'm building a life in alignment with what my body, my time, and my community need right now. If the consequence for investing in this path is failure, then I open my heart to "loving what every second goes away." ⁴ Staying present in what I am loving about my life, staying grateful to the people who make it possible, and trusting that I am strong enough for the pain of failure.