Confidence is not believing that your plans will work out or that the worst won’t happen: that’s optimism. Confidence is knowing that you can recover when things go wrong. The military have a saying about plans: "no plan survives its first contact with the enemy". Contingency planning is essential: working out what might go wrong and how you are going to cope with it.
This is why you read the manual, hire good people and train the rest: good people will have the knowledge to fix it when it goes wrong. To put the same thing another way: you don’t hire a professional builder to chase in a water pipe, you hire them because they know what to do when the bricks fall out of your wall. (This actually happened during some work I had done on my bathroom.)
Some things aren’t supposed to have another door: marriage, children, joining the Mafia, ageing and taxes. Which is why people invented divorce, adoption and the Netherlands Antilles, and continue to look for something to slow or reverse ageing. (You can’t get out of the Mafia.)
"Never enter a room with only one door" should be a Russian proverb if it isn’t already. Always have a way out, a Plan B. That way you don’t have to worry about what happens if something goes wrong.
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