Why do I Preach the Glory of Risk?

Risk-taking is the grapefruit of life: that magical combo of bitter, sweet and zowie-sour that opens your eyes and zaps your brain with new ways of seeing. 

You go for risk in the hope of tasting glory. But what do I mean by glory?  I mean the joy. The life.  The deliciousness of propelling yourself far.  Far unto unexpected new worlds.  

Embarking in risk is the ultimate luxury.  Ironically, I suspect the sadness of many rich people stems from their aversion to risk.  But they’re not the only ones.  We’re surrounded by naysayers reflexively conditioned to chant “don’t-do-that.” These people are destructively wrong.  Wrong to themselves, super-wrong to their kids, crushingly bad to their friends.  

But who am I to be peddling the virtues of risk-taking, pretending to be some sort of expert in this commodity?  I’ve been such a dumb-lucky survivor.  Just look at my journey: polite observers might call it a bloody miracle; cynically astute critics may quip it’s more like a dark tragi-comedy.

Truth is, the cumulative trauma from risks gone-bad has at many periods in my life really crushed my soul. If I were to write an “About Risk” letter to my younger self, this is what I’d say:

In our life we face a trinity of risks: those that might kill you (Killer Risk), those that might kill your soul (Trauma Risk), versus others that will bring you joy (Glory Risk).  You take risk because you must seek glory.  

A bit more on this trinity of risks:

Glory Risk - Reason for living.  Chasing grapefruits. Joy, deep satisfaction, hunger for new.  It’s about striving for things that are challenging, for the hope of big personal wins.  These challenges could be relatively superficial, or complex.  For example, I’m now trying (mostly failing) to develop a writing habit for the personal glory I believe will come from it, but I prevent myself from publishing and taking more writing risks for fear of making a fool of myself (trauma)

Trauma Risk - will kill your soul, if you allow it.  I wish I’d learned as a 10-year-old that failure is the natural waste-product of trying.  Obviously, try to make less waste.  Avoid the same mistakes.  But dwell as little as possible on how you screwed up and what others think of you.  There is no minimum mourning period for brooding over your failures.  The shorter the better.  This is not to say you should be flippant about your failures.  By all means, be contrite, reflect on it, but don’t dwell!  Truth is, nobody dwells on your foolish blunders more than you do.  But even today, I struggle to convince myself of this last point.  These are the Trauma Risks - just because they don’t kill you physically, doesn’t mean they can’t destroy you spiritually, if you let them…

Killer Risks - yeah these might kill you, or someone else.  Obviously, avoid death.  The funny thing about these killer risks - at least for me - is that although I’ll occasionally shudder at the stupid things that almost killed me, I’m not traumatized by these experiences, and I don’t dwell on them.  Killer Risks might kill you physically, but they’re unlikely to do what Trauma Risks do, which is to kill your spirit.  Many people pursue Killer Risks to experience Glory Risk, which I think is selfish to your loved ones and short-sighted if in life you’re going for the long game. I think we should try to pursue Glory Risks with low Killer Risk.

Examples of my Killer Risks (stupid stuff that was unnecessary and I fortunately survived):

Scene 1: Careening down gravel timber roads on my bicycle at over 60 km/hr in the mountainous  jungles somewhere between ChiangRai and Vientiane. Constant rain.  A pre googlian-era cycle journey with disintegrating paper-map.  Lost, dehydrated, with a broken spoke, no idea where I’d sleep: temples, police stations and rudimentary hospital set-ups.  The journey, conceptually OK, the downhill speeds: stupid.

Scene 2: Racing in the rain on a 150cc scooter after a drunken game of tennis with the doctors. Chaotic Saigon streets. In the flash of a second, wiping out and sliding across the wet asphalt, all the way onto the other side of the road.  Amazing, no broken bones, not run over.  Just lots of blood from surface scrapes. Stupid.

Scene 3: Convincing the pilot of a Merpati Fokker-27 Friendship traversing Kalimantan to give me the controls and take my seat back with the passengers, only to get lost due to my fear of flying straight through dark clouds.  Seeing pilots dripping in sweat is scary.  Crashing in Kalimantan would definitely have been a big stupid killer risk. 

Scene 4: Various drunken episodes that surprisingly weren’t on wheels or wings, but still: stupid.

Examples of my Traumatic Risk (it’s still not easy to write about these. I’d much rather recount 10 more Killer Risks):

Scene 1: In 2018 I faced a perfect storm of investment disasters.  Probably half of my portfolio was underwater.  I managed to compound, across a portfolio in multiple dodgy jurisdictions from Kurdistan to West Perth, pretty much every investment mistake imaginable.  My exit from the fund was surprisingly civil, perhaps because of the magical diversity of loss situations I was leaving to be explained to shocked investors in the context of systems and risk control.

Scene 2: Earlier in my career I was the advisor to a large conglomerate in the sale of their fibre-optic business to private equity funds.  I was perpetually underslept the whole time I worked at this investment bank.  My only social life came from the 5 jobless people hanging out in my apartment. I remember pitching the fibre-optic business to one of the biggest global PE funds and completely bungling up the sales process.

Scene 3: I was in the undergraduate honors program at my university, a select group of about 30 of us, studying together for four years.  But I graduated without honors because my thesis paper was absolute crap.  I got completely lost and went into a deep cave for all the writing and research, for some reason neglecting all the support available to me. It was hugely embarrassing.  I graduated without honors and became a recluse from my honors classmates.

Scene 4: In 5th Grade I became class president of about 150 fifth graders in my school in Mexico City.  This entailed making posters, participating in a debate and delivering a campaign speech.  I won by a landslide, but within about 8 weeks found myself being reprimanded by a teacher (in the middle of the soccer field) and a few disgruntled students.  Turns out I was supposed to be coordinating bake sales.  I actually had nightmares about this failure and never mentioned it to my parents.

Recalling my Risk Traumas was scary to write, but now feels a combination of ridiculous and cathartic.  What a shame I let them eat-away at me for so long.  The experiences definitely dampened my confidence, risk-taking spirit and overall mojo (some may rejoice).  

From a social economic perspective, I wonder if avoided risk-taking from fear of Trauma does more damage to potential GDP growth than Killer-Risks.  Social productivity would be higher if we were all better trained to be more astute yet fearless risk-takers.  For some unfortunate reason we delude ourselves into thinking that most risks entail far worse outcomes than is really the case.

So why have I written this essay?  For myself, and for my family.  

I want my family  to see me embarking on new ventures and learning new things;  failing in some, succeeding in others.  I occasionally get stressed wondering if the consulting career path I’ve chosen is too risky. I know that I need to be more strategic and astute in my risk taking.  

For my daughters, I’d like to help them learn to identify the traps of Risk Trauma. I want them to become aware of our mind’s tendency to over-amplify our failures, to pursue the art of brushing off failures, and to develop an enthusiasm for taking bigger bolder risks.  Glory Risks.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.  The credit belongs to the [one] who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; … who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if [failing], at least fails while daring greatly.

Theodore Roosevelt

 

Thank you for suggestions and feedback from Anna KN, Abhi K, Derek W, Chris W, Ann H.