The cliché is so trite that it’s an anachronism.
“HAVE A PLAN-B!”
It’s insurance. A hedge against the unforseen. A nod to the risk you don’t necessarily want to take.
My wife and I admonished our oldest daughter for years to have a Plan-B. She’s a creative. A dancer. No, I mean there is no LIFE without dance. But that’s a formula for your basic starving artist syndrome, right? Then there was the back injury, the knee injury. Still no Plan-B.
So who was right?
See? That’s the problem with a Plan-B. It zaps your laser focus on Plan-A, and begins to eat away at your confidence.
Sure, I could probably coach voice acting (I’m asked all the time about it), but that Plan-B would only take me away from the work I really WANT to do: voice-acting. And make no mistake, it WOULD draw away my time/energy/plans. Then my allegiances are split. I’m serving two masters.
How much risk are you willing to accept in your life and career? Click To Tweet
On the other hand, unpredictable challenges DO pop up in life, and can throw a monkey-wrench in schemes built on stubborn certainty. (there’s a cliché for that too. It’s called “…the best laid plans…”).
The genesis of all this mind meandering is a comment a true sage and mensch in this business made to me in an email. He was noticing the growing achievements in AI-driven synthetic voices. In an almost frightened voice, he lamented that voice-acting as we know it is going to change dramatically if these advances in synth-voice continue.
He may indeed be right. I noted at the end of a recent blog that “Change is the only constant”. To survive in this world of daily sweeping changes, one must be agile.
So is “Plan-B” a cop-out, or a life-saver? A hedge against uncertainty, or a drain on your focus?
How much risk are you willing to accept in your life and career?
Only you can say.
Can it hurt to have more than one stream of revenue?…or an ace in your pocket?
BTW, my daughter — the dancer — never DID give up her dream, but it did morph into choreography, and movement sciences, and she is still fulfilling her creativity. Oh, and she has a job at a major corporation in LA to pay the bills.
Has she sold out?
Hardly.
…and I haven’t even gotten around to explaining what “Plan-C” is.
Do YOU know?
CourVO