No risk, no reward

 

I have to confess; I have a tendency to avoid risk. Yeah, I know—SHOCKER! But I don’t like going looking for problems, and if I can find a path that gives me the least headaches, then I’ll take that one. I suppose most people agree that they don’t go looking for problems, but the thing they’ve learned is that problems naturally come in a circumstance with greater reward. People who aren’t afraid of risk set their sights on the upside. To them, everything else is just a minor speed bump along the way. Those “problems”, so called to them, are just minor compared to the great endgame they have envisioned for themselves. It’s the smoothest path that everyone else travels, but it’s the road less travelled that has the most to offer. Also, you don’t learn much new on that well-paved highway.

I’ve heard it said before: a team learns much more from the games they’ve lost than the games they’ve won. I suppose that makes sense; it’s the losses that force you to become better. Sports are a good analogy for life in that way. Probably the most relevant example we can all relate to regarding risk comes in how we handle our money. It’s an axiom of life that we toe the line of investing enough for the future, while still having enough to live on in the present. Any financial advisor will tell a younger person they can afford more risk when they are young than they can when they are approaching retirement. The reason being a younger person having more time to make up for any losses on a higher-risk investment portfolio. Someone in their 30’s can tolerate more risk than a 50 year-old. Still—no matter your risk tolerance—I wouldn’t move forward on that ocean front property in Arizona. It might not live up to expectations.
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And maybe that’s another thing about risks: knowing which risks to take. When we’re younger we may be able to afford more risk, but we’re also more susceptible to risk. In our naiveté, we run our finances aground through uneducated decisions and, sometimes, the help of financial hucksters—who can even be well-meaning, but don’t have a clue as to a wise financial course of action. Things seem kind of backwards in this way. A younger person has the tolerance for risk, but not the wisdom of discerning risk, while an older person has lower tolerance for risk, yet has developed the wisdom through experience to discern which risks are worth taking—one of the paradoxes of life, I guess.

But know this: the rewards we receive in life are, most generally, directly proportional to the risks we take. If we take a risk in good faith, it’s not something to hang our head about in shame if it doesn’t quite pan out. The ones who didn’t take any risk are still back on shore. They never even ventured out onto the water. They may have a dry boat, but no fish in the hold. What good is a boat safe on land? You can’t catch any fish that way.

…Let’s go deeper

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