“Having a Plan B is planning to fail. Burn the boats.” — Steven Bartlett
Conventional wisdom treats backup plans as responsible risk management. Have a Plan B. Keep your options open. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. This advice is appropriate in many contexts — investing, safety planning, supply chain management.
But Bartlett identifies a critical domain where it is catastrophically wrong: personal ambition and creative commitment.
When you create a backup plan for a deeply desired goal, you do something dangerous at the psychological level: you signal to your own brain that you anticipate failure. The backup plan is not just an option — it is an expression of incomplete confidence in the primary path. And incomplete confidence changes your behaviour in ways so subtle you often don’t notice.
When Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortéz landed in Mexico in 1519, he famously ordered his ships burned. The message to his men was unambiguous: there is no going back. Conquest is the only option. The legend illustrates the psychological power of removing retreat as a possibility — it concentrates all psychological and physical resources on the only available path. This is Plan-A thinking in its most extreme form.
The research on goal commitment shows that when alternatives are available, people invest less effort in pursuing their primary goal. This is not laziness — it is a rational response to reduced stakes. If you can fall back on Plan B, the cost of not succeeding at Plan A is lower. And lower stakes produce lower effort, lower creativity, and lower resourcefulness.
Conversely, when retreat is truly not an option, the brain mobilises its full capacity. Problem-solving becomes more creative. Obstacles that would have been treated as reasons to consider the backup plan instead become challenges that must be overcome.
For your most important goals and commitments, become a Plan-A thinker. Remove the psychological safety net and force yourself to find the solutions that only commitment without alternatives generates.
This is not recklessness. Bartlett is not advocating ignoring risk or failing to plan for contingencies in operational contexts. Plan-A thinking is a psychological posture — a commitment to a primary path so complete that the brain treats it as the only option.
In practice, this looks like:
For your most important current goal, honestly assess:
The paradox of Plan-A thinking: the deeper your commitment to a single path, the more resources — creative, psychological, relational — you bring to bear on it, which ironically makes success more likely. The very inflexibility that seems like a risk is what generates the resourcefulness that reduces the risk.
This is why the most successful people often seem unreasonably committed to the point of obsession. The obsession is not a personality trait — it is a strategic choice that generates the level of engagement necessary for extraordinary outcomes.