Two off the first tee.

It’s a simple enough concept. Often without adequate time to warm-up, and with heightened nerves on the first hole, it’s common for weekend golfers to allow a make-up shot if the first tee shot doesn’t go well.

With this in mind, there are two ways to approach the tee box.

You either walk up and hit the first ball like any other hole, expecting to deal with the consequences of the shot. Or you plan to shoot two.

If you walk up to that first tee box with a second ball in your pocket “just in case,” it’s almost guaranteed that your first shot will be poor enough that you do in fact need to use your second shot.

Same thing when there’s a challenging shot down a tight fairway or over a large body of water. The intuitive move is to switch to a lower quality ball just in case you hit it out of bounds.

But again, that simple precaution seems to drastically decrease the chances of a successful shot.

Taken to another level, Batman sees this phenomenom in the Dark Knight Rises as he tries to climb out of the prison-pit that he’s trapped in.

For his first few attempts, he tries climbing out of the pit while wearing a safety harness to catch him in case he falls. And he fails every time.

Ultimately, he realizes that his only chance to succeed is by free climbing and removing failure as a plausible option in his mind.

To be fair, I don’t ever see myself trying to scale a wall without wearing safety equipment, and I don’t recommend that anyone else does either. But the concept is interesting.

Sometimes, the simple act of having a plan B is enough to guarantee that you’ll need it.

-Brandon