To Chase a Dream or Play it Safe Part 3- Learning to Manage Risk

Felix Baumgartner's record-breaking space jump relied
on the careful calculation of risk factors and variables,
not just hope or faith that he would pull it off. 

If you are serious about trying to achieve any kind of a major dream, one on the first questions that you should ask yourself is, "Am I good at taking risks?" Notice, my question was NOT, "Am I a risk taker?" Gamblers are risk-takers, but we all know that when it comes to gambling, the house always wins. The 71% of business owners who fail in the first 10 years are obviously also risk-takers. The question is, ARE YOU GOOD AT IT? In my experience, getting my dreams to come to fruition has meant taking risk after risk after risk, and managing to doing so, with a fairly high success rate. While sometimes, this did mean taking incredible leaps of faith, (especially when I was younger and didn't know what I was doing yet), the older I got, the more I came to realize that success is about taking carefully calculated risks, not random ones or relying on hope or faith. Recently, I read an interview where Felix Baumgartner, (who recently did the world's highest skydive and broke the sound barrier in the process), was asked if he would have done the jump if he had a 50/50 chance of killing himself in the process. He responded, "Never. Fifty-fifty means you get the same chance to die as to survive. I'd never work that way. That'd be stupid." He only agreed to the jump once he could weigh all of the variables involved and could calculate the risk out to be less than 10%. The same goes with stunt work. When I was training at stunt school, I was taught about an unfortunate case of a woman who passed away because she attempted to do a high fall stunt before she was ready for it. At the time, she was just too inexperienced to do a stunt of that caliber, but was too afraid of missing her big chance to simply say no. Luck is nothing more than when opportunity meets preparation. If you are well prepared, the opportunity will be a "lucky" one. If you are not, then as in the aforementioned case, the results can do more harm to you than good.

This does not mean however that you should pass up a good chance just because you are liable to make mistakes. In my own career, I was fortunate enough that the very first film I ever had a chance to audition for (Godzilla: Final Wars) had a $20 million dollar budget, and I was just good enough to get into it. It jump started my career in a major way, but that also meant that when I showed up on set, that more or less everyone knew what they were doing, and I didn't. I made all kinds of mistakes...and I embarrassed myself on more than one occasion, but I learned the world in the process...and did just good enough to get called back for my next movie. The difference is, in my case, the risk factor for what I was doing was considerably less. At worst, I would just look inexperienced, unskilled, or, stupid. None of that was really affect my life after the film was completed. The point that I am trying to make is, while mistakes are natural and the best way to learn, you should never take a major risk with your life, family, well-being, or finances with just a blind hope that its going to work out. In cases where someone else is pushing you to go for it (such as in investing in their "sure-thing" stock or business) you also need to be aware of the fact that they may be pushing you in their best interest and not really yours. Again, referring back to the unfortunate stuntwoman, the director, (not knowing much about stunts), probably asked for something that was impossible to do safely, or at least was far beyond what she was capable of. Then the stunt coordinator, wanting to get in good with the director, agreed to it with the hope that she would pull it off without really thinking of her safety first. Then she agreed to it with the hope that she could pull it off, when in her heart she probably knew that she just wasn't ready for it. The fact of the matter is, you have to decide for yourself what a reasonable risk is, and if there are too many question marks or variables for you to account for, then you are probably best holding off until such time that you can get some or most of them answered.

Now granted, that doesn't mean that even with this calculation process, I still don't make mistakes. Everybody does. The fact of the matter is though, the better I got at weighing variables and calculating risk, the less and less and less I was wrong, and the fewer and farther between those mistakes became. Conversely, while Im not encouraging for you to take every risk you find, I am also not encouraging you to play it safe. Trying to be successful is a lot like driving in the city. If you try and wait for all the lights to be green, you'll be there all day. Sometimes you have to go even when you know the next light is red, BECAUSE you know that it will eventually turn green too. Sometimes you have to go even when you can't even see the next light. Other times, you may even have to run a red light when no one is looking, and still other times, no matter what you do, you're just going to get stuck in a traffic jam, with no gas, time or money and not even so much as an old sandwich to tide you over while you figure out how in the he-- you're going to get yourself out of it. Still, the more time you take to "learn the lights" on your street, the better your chances are of making it across the dangerous part of town...and into the nicer areas.

References
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0399102/ 
http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/15/failure-is-a-constant-in-entrepreneurship/http://smallbiztrends.com/2008/04/startup-failure-rates.html
http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/10/24/felix-baumgartner-the-austrian-daredevil-on-his-world-record-jump-fear-and-not-saying-goodbye/