Making a backup plan takes away effort from your goals and makes you more likely to fail and need your backup plan.
I don't remember if this is from a famous quote, a blog post, HN discussion, or a video. I've found it to be true in some situations.
Yes, and false in others. We don't hear as much from the people that shoot for the moon and fail because they tend to keep quiet about it and slink back to their boring jobs and lives, if they still can.
Personally I'd like to hear more about the failures around here because the relentless cheerleading sounds phony and you can learn at least as much from the failures as the successes.
But I agree that it'd be nice to hear of lessons learned from more of the failures. Something is wrong when the majority of startups fail, but the majority of the popular blog posts are about success, or are from those who have succeeded.
And now time for a shameless plug. To avoid the survivor bias, I started my blog when I quit my job: http://alexshye.wordpress.com/. If I flame out, it will be documented on the inter webs :)
I did the same thing myself a year ago. I've already got a long list of things I'd do differently if I started again today.