If you want to have back up capacity, you have to be okay with not optimizing every bit of your current capacity.
So, if you want to be ten minutes ahead of time for every appointment, you have to be at peace with the fact that you will often not make the best use of those ten minutes at hand.
Similarly, if you have a back up battery at home that you also use every evening during peak hours, you have to make peace with not utilizing every bit of available capacity if you want to save it for an outage.
On the flip side, if you want to optimize your time till the last minute, you will have to make peace with being late from time to time.
Or, in the case of that back up battery, you have to be okay with the refrigerator losing power on a day where you’ve used up all that safety capacity. That’s just the cost of not having a back up.
You can’t have it both ways.
The key then is to invest in back up capacity for high stakes scenarios. And, in all others, to make peace with the consequences of not having back up capacity.
Again, you can’t have it both ways.
