Second in the series letters to my kids…
Hey guys,
Here are some great thoughts about risk and how you should think about it. For some reason our society places risk in a negative category along with bad habits, failures, and mistakes. Once risk is placed in that negative category we all avoid it like the plague and think that managing risk means not taking any risks. It also means not failing, never admitting we have bad habits, and never owning up to our mistakes. For whatever reason these things have been hammered home in society through the media, books, and our education system. This makes it difficult to break out of the common mold in society and truly live up to our capabilities and pursue our dreams.
That is what I like about this article, it walks through the fact that risk itself is not a bad thing. It explains a bit about how we should look at risk. That risk is a natural part of life and accepting the risk, planning how to embrace and evaluate risk is a critical skill of the most successful. Only those who are willing to address the risks in a project or a career move are the ones that have the opportunity to reap the rewards of taking those risks and usually the potential negatives from those risks are pretty small.
If you are young – you have very little to lose – your life savings is small, your living expenses are small, and what you commit your time to is entirely up to you. Perhaps you just graduated High School or College and have a life savings of $5,000. That is huge by many standards, but what if you lost it all? How horrible would that be at the ripe age of 24 with years and years to earn it back?
Risk is not something to avoid, it is something to evaluate to see if there is an opportunity there.
Love,
Dad