On the Thing Called "Risk Taking"

It has been a busy and interesting week. Most of my friends (like Mikoyan) from whose thoughts I derive my articles were nowhere to be seen as they were busy preparing for examinations (Wait! I was also writing mine). Had no chat to talk about which forced me to go back two years, 5 months and 16 days back.


That exact date was a memorable day because it was my 20th birthday. For the first time I had two parties or something that looked like it and I loved that so much.


I will not get into the details on the parties but I would like to say something about the advice one Kabambo Kalombola (we used to call him Alfred then) gave me. I have forgotten the actual words he said that time, but what he was saying was sort of advocating for the "screw it, let's do it" kind of life, if I am to borrow Sir Richard Branson's language.


In his words, he had observed that I am the sort of person who calculates every move I want to make to the end before executing. He also observed that every moment I saw an anticipated danger to any plan that could halt its completion, I would leave the project, important as it may be. Maybe most of that was taking reference to my reserved attitude to relationships. Gone now.


The point? He revealed to me a description that I have by word. I used to do that without giving much thought to it. After he said it, I got to give it a serious thought and perfect the art of fact-based foresight. It's amazing how an advocate of something I have never and will never agree with was able to help me perfect the opposite in me.


I did not need to read any book for me to be like this. I was born in the month of May, which makes my sign Taurus and in the year of the Rooster in the Chinese Zodiak for those of you who believe in that sort of thing. It might be the thing that explains my prudence for you. In my own right, I think it is my upbringing that has made me "overly careful" as dear Kabambo ( who is too much of a risk taker) pointed out.


If you try to think of the benefit of the when thing, here is the philosophy behind it.


You need to do an assessment of anything and as you do that you need to have a goal in mind. When you have the goal you need to map out all the possible ways or processes to it. By this you also need to think of who will be involved and how they will affect the achievement of the goal; the sort of people they call stakeholders in the corporate world.


The point of doing this assessment is to see whether what you are up to is feasible or not. If it is and you see no possible hiccups in the way, you go for it. If you see that there will certainly be something between you and your goal, that is where you need to make a critical decision. It is just that you either abandon the project completely or try to fix the potential problem before you hit the road. The former is what dear Kabambo faulted me with. To be honest I like working in comfort zones so I don't like cracking my head with fixing issues when I have an easy way which is called abandoning ship. Not something you have to learn from me, anyway. We are different and some of these things are done looking at the benefits of the ventures. The rule is to never fight losing battles, for those of you that missed that one.


Now here is where the feasiblity analysis gets interesting. It is not always in black and white and as simple as feasible and not feasible. There will be some times that after factoring everything out you might just end up with an ambiguous result; not knowing whether you will succeed or not. Some of you might be able to identify with this sort of situation. There is no single way of handling this situation.


There might be some time that you might just have to get to it and deal with circumstances as you go along. Ray Bradbury once said that sometimes we just have to jump out of the window and grow wings on the way down. The sort of thing called risk taking.


Risk taking. Now this is the sort of thing that people have grossly misunderstood over the times. If you were to ask me about risk taking based on the analysis I just shared, I would think of only one situation as one that calls for risk taking.


When you are sure that something will work, fine and good. You do not need to take any risk. On the extreme end, when you know there is a clear hiccup that cannot be fixed, you do not need to go for it because that is stupidity as opposed to risk taking.


Risk taking is the sort of thing you do in a 50-50 situation and it is about venturing into the unknown.


Some might think I might be advocating for the sort of lazy and "in-the-comfort-zone" life I live and love to stay in. Far from the point. On the other hand, I am just trying to draw the line between risk taking and the other close thing people mistake it for; and it is called carelessness.


I could write some more paragraphs on this, but I guess reaching this far you have gotten the sense of what I wanted to communicate. Like I pointed out, even Jesus himself once talked about making a calculation of costs before we start building a house. I guess that could be another one to draw a lesson from, otherwise not all we call risk taking deserves to be called that.


That being said, I should also say that not all risks are worth taking. Topic for another day,   but that's it.



Post script.

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