The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Plan, Plan, Plan

The Walking Dead season 11 episode 17

Always have a back-up plan.

While Maggie, Daryl, Aaron, Father Gabriel, and Annie were busy trying to fight off Hornsby and his troops in Virginia, Carol, realizing that the team was grossly outgunned and outnumbered, knew that trying to fight him wasn’t going to stop him.

So, what did she do? She devised a backup plan.

She figured that if she could locate Sebastian Milton and reunite him with his mother, it might give her the cachet needed to put a stop to Hornsby’s takeover of Virginia and get her friends their freedom back.

As important as having a plan is in a zombie apocalypse, having a backup plan is equally important. This is for a couple of reasons. Firstly, if you only have one plan for dealing with issues in the apocalypse, should circumstances change or some random event unexpectedly occurs and screw up that plan, you’re probably left scrambling and confused, opening the door for disaster. And secondly, the simple fact is: There is always the chance that something you didn’t know about, maybe even couldn’t know about, arrives and blows your plan to pieces. If you have a backup plan, it will likely be conceived not specifically for your exact circumstances but certainly with the possibility of your original plan going sideways firmly in mind, and therefore, likely be more capable of adapting to your new reality.

If I’m being honest, if you’re already sitting down and thinking up plans, it might be a good idea to think of the most reasonable ways that plan could get derailed and then think up plans, both general and specific, for those possibilities, so that you can just shift to those the moment your original plans get thrown off, and not miss a beat in dealing with whatever crisis or threat has come your way.