For if it miscarries the damage is irreparable. It may easy happen that a man should fail once, especially at first: circumstances are not always favourable... Always connect your second attempt with your first: whether it succeed or fail, the first will redeem the second. Always have resort to better means and appeal to more resources.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
Any single attempt can fail for reasons outside your control, so betting everything on one throw is a structural mistake, not a matter of confidence. The wise never let one outcome be decisive: they keep a second attempt connected to the first, so that even a failure leaves a foundation to build the recovery on. This is the design principle behind resilience in a career, a business, a plan: no single event, however important, should be able to end the whole thing. Have more than one means to your end, more than one path to the goal, more than one attempt in reserve. The satisfaction of success is rare precisely because so many stake everything on one cast and lose it to a chance that had nothing to do with their merit.
Practice
- Design out the single point of failure: no one meeting, client, exam, or launch should be able to end the whole endeavour.
- Connect attempts in sequence; frame the first try so that even if it fails it builds toward the second (maxim 19 sets expectations low enough to allow it).
- Keep more than one path to any important goal; a plan with a single route is a plan waiting for bad luck (maxim 134 doubles the resources).
Use this when
- Use this on anything high-stakes and chance-exposed: pitches, exams, launches, negotiations that could turn on a bad day.
- Use it building income and reputation; resilience is having no single event that can undo you (maxim 170 keeps the reserve).
Ignore this when
- Don't spread so thin that no attempt gets your full effort; chaining attempts is not the same as making every one half-hearted.
- Don't use "I'll get another chance" to excuse a careless first try; the point is insurance against bad luck, not permission for low effort.
A picture of it
A founder pins the whole company on one demo to one big investor, no backup meetings, no parallel conversations, everything riding on a single afternoon. The projector fails, the investor is distracted, and the miss has nothing to do with the product, but the company is out of runway. A rival founder ran five investor conversations in parallel, framed each so a "no" produced a warm introduction to the next, and treated no single meeting as decisive. One bad afternoon cost the first founder the company. It cost the second one nothing, because the second had never staked everything on a single cast.
Never let one throw be decisive. Chain your attempts, keep a second path, and no single bad day can end you.