In the Marine Corps, we often heard this maxim: “Two is one, one is none.” It’s basically stating that if you have 2 radios, one will break down (and at just the moment when you really need it). And now you have 1 left. And if you only brought one radio, that’s just the same as going out unprepared, with none.
Having a single point of failure, i.e. the one radio, makes you fragile. You are subject to the vicissitudes of life. But having redundancy makes you the opposite of fragile, or antifragile. Yet everywhere you go, you see companies actually forcing their inventories and operations to be fragile with so-called just-in-time or right-sizing concepts. It happens also with personnel; a CEO fails to train a successor then proceeds to have a heart attack. Now the company has no leadership. These organizations try to cut it close in order to maximize profit, hoping that everything will always happen according to plan–that supply chains will always remain intact, that Russia will never invade Ukraine, that relations between the U.S. and China will always be amicable, etc.
The human body knows better. We have 2 kidneys, 2 lungs, 2 eyes, 2 ears, etc.–multiple redundancies to overcome the potential failure of such vital organs. It doesn’t right-size or provide a new kidney “just-in-time” if your old one fails. It absorbs shocks through redundancy.
If you managed your affairs with redundancy in mind, you might equip your car with a spare tire. You might have 6 months of savings to avoid the disruption of a layoff in challenging economic times. You might have a backup generator during a winter storm. You might just save your life!
Are there areas in your life where you’ve been cutting it too close? Banking on the pipe dream that everything will always happen the way you expect? Remember the rule to transform emergencies into non-emergencies: “Two is one and one is none.”
One Ladder Project 