Don’t look at the truck

October 23. 2024.
By: Andrea Havre

I few days ago, maybe a couple of weeks—I don’t have good concept of time—I read (or heard?) about not having a plan B. How if you have a plan B you have already set yourself up to the possibility that you will fail plan A, which is what you really want to do. And it stuck with me.

You see, when I was learning to ride a car before taking my drivers license, I was driving with my instructor, who was one of the most relaxed people I think I have ever met. He was so chill, when I was anything but. And one day I was driving on the main road, and I was uttering my fear of passing large trucks. They felt so huge, and gave me the impression of having the smallest car, not enough space to drive my little car and very much thinking about how, if we crashed, the truck would drive right over me and I would become a flat human pancake. If you’ve ever driven a car on a main road, you probably know the feeling. However, my driving instructor being the chillest guy ever, said to me: “Andrea, if you don’t want to hit the truck, don’t look at the truck—look at the road. Always look at where you’re going, because you will automatically drive the direction you are looking”. And while he did not at all mean this as a metaphor, it always stuck with me; both when I am driving a car—which I have been successfully doing for eight years without hitting any trucks—but also as a metaphor in life. Looking where you’re not going will throw you off your track.

So when I learned about how not having a plan B, I thought about this metaphor. Because having a plan B, is like looking the wrong way, even for a second, and it’s gonna make you stagger. And if you stagger, you either won’t hit any of your marks, you hit the truck or you fall with your face (or ass) first.

While I’m writing this, I realise how many metaphors there is saying exactly this. “Keep your eyes on the price” for an example. It really does say the same, doesn’t it? But still, it really never resonated with me. I have never heard that expression and got any feeling of let’s fucking go—anything is possible. Yet, this kind of made up metaphor about looking at the road and not at the truck, looking where your going because you will automatically go that way—it gives me that feeling of opportunity. Capability. Prospect.

When I quit my job to do my own thing, I never consciously thought about not having another plan. I never wrote it down or told anyone. I probably said some version of “I’ll just have to get another job, then”, but I never really made myself any plan B. An escape plan. The get-another-job-plan is more of a thats-what-people-do-thing, than it is me planning it. I don’t think I ever doubted it would work. That I would find a way to live my life the way I wanted to live it. Obviously I’m damn lucky being born in one of the worlds richest countries, with health care and gay rights—but I have never, ever wanted to live my life in the 9-5-kinda way that is the norm. I never felt like a traditional person. So when I actually got the chance of making my own way, the thought of what if it fails never really entered my mind. And still, a year later, even though I haven’t in any way made myself rich or famous or anything like that, I reflect, probably even more than a year ago, about my life in the future with the money and the freedom. What I want to do, when I’m actually able to do mostly anything. And by thinking about it every day, I also never look in the wrong direction. I haven’t once looked for other, conventional jobs or thought about giving up. The thoughts of should I do anything different, what’s gonna be my main offer, how can I do business better, how can I earn more money—these things I think about mostly everyday. But they never move in the direction of quitting. Because I’m not going that way, so why look in that direction?

Now, this sounds nice and all, right? But there is one other factor, and it’s important as hell. In the year or so I’ve been doing my own shit, I’ve surrounded myself only with people who believe I can make it. Or mostly that is, I’ll say 99 prosent, because I really cannot choose every person I talk to in life. But the folks I have closest to me, the ones I actually talk to most days, those people never questioned anything. And for me it’s not that they believe that I am able to run a business and earn the money—its’s the general belief that it is possible to live a different way. The openness to the fact that working nine to five at an office isn’t what everyone wants. And I think we all know that a lot of the people who don’t believe it’s possible to do anything else don’t necessarily want to spend their life in an office either, they just don’t know how to do anything different. Or they are small minded human beings who don’t want anyone else to do what they really want—and those people I don’t care about for a second anymore. You see, I’ve had people close to me that didn’t do anything but limit me. And without those people I do have a lot less friends, but a lot more belief in myself and a lot more energy to put into the things I wanna do. So it’s not really a loss.

Who you surround yourself with is important for your ability to keep your gaze straight ahead at where you want to go. And if the people you have close to you make you look towards the truck, maybe you don’t need them—because it takes a lot of energy to keep turning your gaze in the right direction again and again. And it takes a lot of courage to choose plan A as the only plan there is, but it is the only plan there is. Because it’s the plan you want. And you can change plan A how many times you want, but you never need a plan B. Plan B is the truck, not because it is going to make you a into a human pancake, but because it is a distraction from plan A.