There is risk everywhere, it is known. We live our daily lives and it just sits there unapprehended and ignored. On the business side of things, it becomes a burden that starts weighing more and more in your career. As you grow your career, the weight of these decisions starts to fall more on you. The time for you to take action starts to diminish and their impact starts to stack up and ripple through the company. And the end of the day, it is about evaluating the known and making a decision on the unknown… And at that moment is when risk comes and sits at the table and starts embedding doubt in our minds.

Every decision you make might be the wrong one.

Every prediction you make might end up not fulfilling.

Every bluff you do might get called.

There are two generally overlooked views on risk.

  1. Low-risk events don’t happen

It is easy to overlook or completely disregard that a 1% chance of failure might simply happen. This is the stock market manager who freaks out when the market does not go up or down in the way that he had analyzed it. And then we have Roy Sullivan, the man who allegedly was struck by lightning seven times when the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are only around 1 in 500,000.

  1. High-risk means failure

This view on life might be poisonous to you. Just to be clear: I am not stating that high risk is good, but with an exponential higher reward, taking the additional risk can be beneficial. We find ourselves being the person that has fear of surgery with a 1% risk. It is too easy to ignore the 99% likelihood that it would turn up just fine.

In the end, there are generally two outcomes. It might work or it might not work. Living with your decisions and knowing that it might swing one way or the other is the key to moving forward.

Image by John

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