The future is unpredictable. It’s always great to have an option, maybe two, in case things don’t go according to plan. That’s why you’d want to have a backup plan.

In my freshman year in university, I made a backup plan that took too much of my energy. According to my plan, I would switch programs, do three months of summer school, and take just a month off to recover. 

Summer school all but broke me. I went into my sophomore year totally burned out. I couldn’t perform well enough to get the grades I needed to get accepted. 

What I learned was that it often costs energy, focus, time, and money to keep a backup plan available. In my case, I lost focus of my main plan, which was to get into business school.

You want to constantly limit the effort you spend on your back up plan. It shouldn’t be as good as the main plan. It can be less detailed, less certain, and have a smaller payoff. 

In my case, the risk of not doing summer school was that I might graduate a semester later than everyone else. This would not be apocalyptic, and not worth the risk of getting rejected. It was just a backup plan.

What you want to do is keep most of your efforts focused on the main plan and making that come to life. That’s what I wish I did—I wish I set myself up to take a bigger swing in sophomore year. If I still got rejected, then I would have failed giving it my best effort.

Remember, a backup plan is just a backup plan. The best backup plan is one that you don’t have to use, because you made the main plan work.