1.In one discipline, you can focus on the small details.

2.In the other, you could die if you do that.

Preparedness is like getting a meal ready in the slow cooker. Survivalism is like the deep fryer. If you take too long to deal with things in a survival situation, you're going to get burned.

Something I see far too often is people who focus on preparedness confusing these two things. In a survival situation, there is no time at all to deal with irrelevant details. The speed at which you act can mean the difference between life and death. And I'm not talking about slow death by eating processed food. I'm talking about immediate death, injury, or peril.

Your state of readiness needs to be able to adapt to this.

Irrelevant details

It never fails.

I write an article about an extreme situation without appropriate sanitation and someone comments, "We don't use hand sanitizer or bleach. It's bad for you."

You know what else is bad for you? Sanitation-related illnesses like E.coli, cholera, dysentery, and campylobacter.

Or I write about building a fast kit for an extreme emergency when you're at a tourist attraction and I suggest peanut M&Ms. Someone says smugly, "That's not very organic."