To Hell With It!

The Themes of Dr. Seuss 7 Steps to Get Ready for Home Ownership

To Hell With It!

Have you ever just felt like saying, "To hell with it?" You've been trying to build up your emergency fund, but for the third month in a row life has gotten in the way. You were planning on taking the family on a nice vacation when the car's tranni decided to give up the ghost, so now you're swapping nice-to-have for need-to-fix! If you let the bad mood that comes with plans being sent sliding get the better of you, you're likely to make some pretty risky decisions. Sure, you feel like you'll never get ahead, but going out and racking up a bunch of debt to prove the point isn't the answer.

So what is? Well, studies have been done that show if you have a back-up plan for when your best laid get derailed, you're far less likely to do yourself damage.

One study used an anagram task to put some students in a bad mood. Half the participants were told the task was easy and would only take them five minutes to complete. It was a trick. Three of the anagrams were unsolvable putting those participants in a grumpy mood. The other participants were told the truth, so no bad mood. Then all the participants were asked to describe how they would behave in three imaginary scenarios:

whether to drive an old car with brake problems,
whether to disclose a secret to a room-mate, and
whether to return deliberately damaged shoes to a shop for a refund.

Those students where had no hard and fast plan for dealing with a setback were prepared to take more risk – to hell with it! – while those who had a solid back-up plan were inoculated from the self-defeating behaviour.

Thomas Webb and his team at the University of Sheffield believes that if you come up with plans that state "if a certain situation occurs, then I will respond in a pre-specified way" you won't be at risk of doing yourself in with a stupid decision. Called the "if-then" decision, the pre-formulated backup assuages your need to shoot yourself in the foot.

How concrete? Not all that concrete. It's more a matter of acknowledging that a downside is possible and that you're prepared to deal with it. So simply having a plan to breathe deeply when a setback occurs, or look for ways in which you've successfully dealt with setbacks in the past, are enough to keep you from going off half-cocked.

To think that crap will never happen because you have carefully thought out your plans is delusional. Crap always happens. If you don't have a back-up plan, To Hell With It! will drive you down the wrong path. But if you accept that even the best-laid plans can be sent awry by things beyond your control, and have a plan for dealing with a set-back, you're far less likely to dig your misery hole even deeper.

As Mike Tyson once said, "Everyone has a plan 'till they get punched in the mouth." To survive you need a plan for after you take the punch!