Burning your ships

I've been debating if it's net positive to feel like all your ships have been burnt when starting something new. 

Burning your ships is a widely accepted view in our culture: it represents the process of going all in on something, leaving no room for backup plan or optionality. You embark on a new journey and burn the ship that brought you to its shore. It's quite a graphic metaphor: You lost your means of transportation and now have no choice but to see the journey through. 

I am a big believer in this kind of conviction. I'd say it is existentially required, or at least for most people. Entrepreneurship is not an easy journey, naturally, and as with all other not-easy journeys, the temptation to pause, course correct, and go back to the ship is all too strong. Burning the ships creates an inevitability that can't be replicated. If your goal is to maximize the chances of making it through the journey and succeeding, it is desirable to burn your ships. 

So, let me try explaining why I'm revisiting how I feel about it. 

The feeling that you have no backup plans can be costly. Truly costly. Only someone who burnt their ships can understand how it often feels like life or death. Winning is not easy. If it were, you wouldn’t have chosen to burn the ships. It can take a long time, life can get in the way, and quickly, things can get very hard. If you find yourself there, you will have to face fear, and fear often wins. 

It's like a black hole; the fear sucks you in. Caving into that fear represents death. Yet, you only fear because you obviously want to live. You desperately want to live, and as you burn the ships, living means winning.  

Burning your ships, then, gets into a tricky loop: 

As fear clouds you, the only way out becomes winning; you forget why this was ever fun, now it just sucks. But you are certain of one thing: you can’t afford to lose, so now you must win. Feeling like you must win makes it all too serious, not fun; you were once a free man, now you feel trapped. 

You cave in, fear consumes you. You lose perspective, forget why you cared about winning in the first place. Why was it that you chose to burn the ships? You may not remember anymore.  Fear consumes you. You can't see clearly. Memory betrays you. The energy you once felt now feels elusive. A memory of the old past. You desperately want to remember why you burned them, but you don’t. Fear consumes you. Now, you must win. You have no choice but to win.

I saw too many friends die there. Things get hard, and they get stuck in that loop, frozen in place, unable to break out or escape. They watch the months and years slip by, sometimes their whole lives, as they remain stuck. As time passes, the cost of burning their ships feels heavier and heavier. The fear grows stronger, and they remain trapped, unable to break free from the very commitment that once drove them forward.