No plan B: why I quit without a safety net

Michael Le · 12 July 2026 · 5 minute read

Everyone who hears I quit a safe corporate job at 46 asks the same question, in the same worried tone your aunt uses at Christmas. "But what was the backup plan?" There wasn't one. That was the plan.

I know how that sounds. Reckless, maybe. Or the start of a very expensive documentary. But a safety net is not free. It costs you something every single day you have it, whether you fall or not. Mine would have cost me the only thing that actually gets a person from zero to something: the full, undivided attention of someone with nowhere else to look.

What a safety net actually does

I used to think a backup plan was just sensible. Insurance for the downside. What it actually did, every time I had one, was let me half try. One eye on the new thing, one eye on the exit, both eyes doing a worse job than either would alone. You cannot sprint and check the map at the same time. You just jog, confused, and call it strategy.

When I quit, I did not have a consulting gig on the side or a "just in case" contract with my old employer. I had four brands, an AI team, and a mortgage that did not care about any of it. No plan B meant no whispering door. Just the one door, the one I walked through, and a strong incentive to make it work.

The difference between reckless and deliberate

People hear "no backup plan" and picture someone jumping off a cliff hoping for wings. That is not what this was. I did not quit on a whim over a bad Monday. I had built toward it for months, saved what I could, and picked a date I could defend to myself at 3am. The recklessness would have been staying twelve more years telling myself I would start "when it was safer", which is a sentence that is never true and always available.

Deliberate looks like this: you remove the exit on purpose, after you have done the unglamorous work of making the one remaining door as strong as you can build it. Reckless is removing the exit by accident and hoping the door holds. I checked the door first. Then I threw away the spare key.

What changed once the net was gone

My focus stopped being a resource I rationed and became the only thing I had. Every hour either went into the work or it didn't, and there was no comfortable third option where I "explored" a fallback while telling myself I was still committed. The work got my full attention because it was the only place left to put it.

It also killed a very specific kind of self-talk. The one that goes "if this doesn't work out I'll just go back to X." That sentence is a release valve, and release valves let the pressure out before the pressure builds anything useful. Diamonds do not form under a safety net. Neither, it turns out, does a business.

What I'd tell someone weighing their own no-plan-B moment

I am not telling you to torch your savings and quit tomorrow because a stranger on the internet did it and wrote a nice sentence about doors. Build the runway first. Learn the skill first. Line up the work first. All of that is the deliberate part, and skipping it is just recklessness wearing a brave costume.

But once you have done the deliberate part, notice how tempting it still is to keep one door open "just in case." That door feels like safety. Most of the time it is just a slower, more comfortable way of not fully starting. At some point the net has to go, or you spend the rest of your life half in the new thing and half still holding the old one, which is its own kind of exhausting, and worse, its own kind of quiet failure that never quite announces itself as one.

I am writing all of this down properly in a book called No Plan B, because five hundred words on a blog cannot hold the whole argument. But the short version is the one I tell people at barbecues now, the same ones who used to ask about my backup plan. I did not have one. I still don't. Twelve months in, that is still the best decision I have made since I decided to have a useful midlife crisis instead of a normal one.