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Late last year, I applied for a job teaching at our local Waldorf school. A bit of context may explain why.
In the autumn of 2023, I was teaching composition at the University of Louisville as an adjunct, a part-time instructor. My title, if it matters, was Senior Lecturer I. I taught three courses three days a week and spent my office hours in the basement of the humanities building. Though I had been an educator for a long time, I hadn’t taught in a college for more than a decade. Why did I go back to that?
I could take you back to the spring of 2020, the start of the pandemic, when I lost my job. I got laid off from my position as a copywriter at a company I’d worked at since it was a startup, a job I’d had for a short stint as a contractor, and for more than six years full-time—eventually, my title was Senior Content Writer. Losing that job was a blow, although I was weary of the job itself, too. The intervening time between the layoff and now has been a sort of controlled chaos—insofar as you can control chaos, that is.
When I got laid off, I was in my fiftieth year. With it went the salary that was paying for my mortgage and student loans and, by year’s end, my health insurance. I applied for probably hundreds of jobs, as did a lot of people, I know. I got a few interviews but no offers. After a glitch in my state application was remedied, I started getting unemployment from the Commonwealth of Kentucky, and by year’s end I had Medicaid. When the state offered me an EBT card, I didn’t refuse. I was the single parent of a daughter, after all, who was in fifth grade when I lost that job.
At about the time the unemployment ran out, a year-and-a-half later—and after all the federal stimulus payments ceased—a former colleague hired me to do some blogging for him and his wife, two different companies. That kept me afloat for a time. When that money ran out, I managed to live off savings until my Prius started to fail. I had to buy a new vehicle, and when I did, it turned out to have costly problems, too.
I needed a job. I could teach, and I figured the pay would cover at least some expenses and help pay off the vehicle and the repairs I’d already done by then. Naturally, the teaching was stressful. By the time my beloved Prius began having engine problems, I’d been looking for a job for over three years. I’d run through a four-month interview process with a private progressive school, only to not get the job. I interviewed with a land conservation organization, and also for a marketing position at a university across the Ohio River, and didn’t get either of those. When I didn’t get the marketing job at the American Printing House of the Blind, after a series of interviews, I was by then getting distraught.
So by the time I saw the Waldorf posting, the main reason I applied was, well, why not? Let’s see what happens.
But here’s the punchline: all those efforts to apply for jobs, including the Waldorf position, were all a series of Plan B’s. So what was Plan A? Stick with me.
I was scrolling through one of my social media apps the other day—Instagram, I believe—and I saw a clip of Arnold Schwarzenegger talking about something I’d not heard him expound on, but that apparently had struck a chord with a lot of others: the fact that he hates Plan B.
I watched this in passing, probably distractedly, but I got curious enough to go looking for a more extensive version later that week. Depending on which video you look at on YouTube, the views range from 10,000 to 208,000 and more in between.
“I hate Plan B,” says Schwarzenegger. OK, so why?
When you are pursuing your dream, you can’t doubt yourself—especially when there are already plenty of people doubting you. When you doubt yourself, Schwarzenegger says, “what you are basically saying is that if my plan doesn’t work, I have a fall back plan.” A “Plan B.” And once you have a Plan B, he says, you start thinking about it, and as you might suspect, whatever thought you put into your Plan B is at the expense of your Plan A.
Plan B is a safety net, and Schwarzenegger insists that “we function better if we have no safety net.” Granted, the evidence there is lacking, though there is the rational idea that Plan A requires full commitment. Plan B cuts you off from the chance at succeeding at what it is you really want because, in a sense, I suppose you’re preparing for the worst rather than for the best.
To have a Plan B, he says, is the result of worrying what will happen if you fail. But “you have to fail in order to climb the ladder.” Winners, he says, fail and get up again. And again, and again, and again. To be afraid of failing is to be “frozen.” When you’re frozen, it means you’re tense, not relaxed—and to do well, says Schwarzenegger, you have to be relaxed.
I want to say here that all this makes perfect sense to me, in the abstract anyway. Focus on Plan A. Give it all you’ve got. Invest in your dreams, and invest everything you have.
Still, even though Schwarzenegger says not to doubt yourself, I confess I have my doubts. Prove me wrong, please.