Risk

What happens when you believe that you have planned for all possible outcomes?

That is where risk rears its head. 

I would consider myself risk averse. While I am an optimist at heart and that is my approach to the world, as I gain more experience and knowledge, I find myself less willing to take risks. 

That doesn’t mean that I am unwilling to take myself out of my comfort zone. 

After all, I have created this website, learned Japanese to a low level, pushed myself to learn how to code with AI, and put myself out there on the internet - subjecting myself to near certain future scrutiny. 

For many, these acts could contradict me stating that I am risk averse. 

Putting yourself in a position to be rejected by others feels inherently risky as human psychology has us wired to crave the acceptance of others. 

But I don’t view these as high-risk activities. 

Take posting these blog posts, for example. 

What do I get out of them? I enhance my ability to put together cohesive arguments or provoke thoughts in others. I share my experience with the potential of serving you. I build a library of content to build a personal brand, showcasing who I am and how I think. I give myself a daily, deliberate practice. 

What are the risks? I talk about my experience and cast myself in a negative light. My writing sucks and I get critical feedback on it. My life details are on the internet forever. I share some polarizing thoughts which cause some people to love me and some people to hate me. My audience grows and my family loses the luxury of privacy. If I am not intentional and deliberate with what I share, I could put my job at risk. 

I view high-risk activities as those that have high-potential negative consequences. I’m talking about the risk of death or financial ruin. 

I am intentional with how I approach this blog and mitigate the largest risks that are present. Which means the likelihood of death and financial ruin are low - but never zero. 

I am willing to take risks as long as the likelihood of those two outcomes are very low. 

I would also consider myself to be strategic with my thinking but not overly strategic to the point of not taking action. 

If I have an idea, I ask myself, “how does this align with my goals?” If it isn’t in-line with them. I ask myself if my current goals have a higher probability of me achieving success than the new idea.

If yes, I keep the idea stored to revisit in the future. If no, then I am happy to pivot. 

There is no meta-analysis that goes into this reflection. It is a pretty simple process that has more or less kept me on track for the last few months. 

It allows me to identify if I am going to be adding unnecessary risk into my situation. 

It allows me to plan my next moves in ways that I believe will ultimately set me up for success. We will see how well I have gauged this in the future. 

In doing this, I thought that I was mitigating risk. Limiting my downside potential as much as possible. 

While you can mitigate it, risk is not a factor that you can reduce to zero. 

Life is unpredictable at its core and risk is what is left when you believe that you have planned for everything. 

While this could be discouraging, I would look at this as your reason to take action. 

If you can only mitigate risk with no chance of eliminating it - that justifies you taking action. 

Try to identify the largest potential implosion points of whatever you are working on, reduce or eliminate those points and start taking action. 

By eliminating the obvious areas of risk, you free yourself to accept the unknown risks that will come up along the way. You accept that you will have to pivot at times and that you will have unexpected obstacles come up. 

But it’s easier to navigate when you know those barriers are inevitable. 

If, instead, you focus on removing every pebble from the path that you are moving on, you will progress so slowly that you will never have the opportunity to reach your destination, if you are able to make any progress at all. 

Instead of death of the project by unknown risk - you suffer death of the project by failure to start. 

And that, my friend, is the biggest risk of them all.