Two is One. One is None.
As an aerospace physiologist in the United States Navy, I put a lot of energy into providing high quality instruction for my students. These were great warriors, such as fighter pilots and Navy SEALs, taking their time to listen to me. I always wanted them to walk away satisfied and that meant that I always needed to show up prepared.
The best lesson I learned about preparing for a military event came in my first year on the job. I was learning to be a better officer and teacher at the Naval Aerospace Medical Institute (NAMI) in Pensacola, Florida. As my powerpoint slides loaded up, my mentor walked over to the computer and pulled the plug. “What do you do now?” he asked with a grin.
Two is One. One is None.
That was the day I learned the phrase military people love to toss around, “Two is one. One is none.” My mentor told me to keep all of my teaching materials backed up. We’d been opening them from a shared drive, but my new plan was to keep them on a CD (thumb drives are essentially banned in the D.O.D. since the Edward Snowden incident). My mentor told me to take it even further and keep a paper copy and a white board marker, just in case all of the computers died. This sounded insane to me, but I printed out the slides and kept a marker with them.
A year later, while teaching a class of jet pilots at a training center on Naval Station Norfolk, all of the computers died. I left the podium, went to my office, grabbed the paper copy and marker, and class went on. My mentor’s advice saved me in the heat of the moment. And that’s what redundancy is all about.
No one thinks it’s worthwhile to have a backup when everything is perfect. The person with all the spares and backups looks like a packrat. And, as a minimalist, I appreciate the desire to avoid clutter. However, when things go wrong, the packrat can be the hero.
Another military example of the power of redundancy is the 3-way positive transfer of controls. When co-piloting a plane, you can take over the control of the plane, but you must establish a verbal understanding that all parties are certain about who controls the plane. It’s not enough to grab the yolk and say, “I have controls.” The required response is, “You have controls,” followed by a third statement, “I have controls.” No one likes this extra chatter, but it wasn’t developed to be liked. It was developed to save lives. And, in the heat of the moment, it is a huge help.
However you apply redundancy, whether teaching, flying, or packing a bug-out-bag during hurricane season, you’re doing yourself a favor. Redundancy makes you antifragile, because it helps you to thrive in chaos. At worst it makes you robust, recovering with grace after a setback.
Look at things that matter to you. There is probably redundancy. Why do you have two lungs? If you see something important that isn’t redundant, it’s time to start thinking. How do you set yourself up to thrive in difficult circumstances?