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“And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.”
Erica Jong
You can pay for a risk you never take. One email cost me a month of dread and thirty minutes of work.
It sat in my inbox while I imagined what was waiting inside.
Each day I chose another day of low-grade dread over a few minutes of discomfort. The unknown was the scary part. When I finally opened the email, the unknown shrank to a small, known task and the dread was gone before I hit send.
A $100 bill hidden under a mattress feels safe. The bill sits still and buys a little less each year. Hide one in 2000 and it buys about half of what it bought then.
In 1975 a Kodak engineer named Steve Sasson built the first digital camera. Management looked at it and said: “That’s cute, but don’t tell anyone about it.” Film made the money and film felt safe, so the digital camera sat shelved for twenty years.
Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012.
Netflix’s founders flew to Dallas in 2000 and offered Blockbuster the whole company for $50 million. Blockbuster ran thousands of stores. Netflix mailed DVDs from a website. The CEO struggled not to laugh and Blockbuster stayed put.
It filed for bankruptcy in 2010.
Standing still feels safe. The bet underneath: prices hold, the market doesn’t change.
“The only lasting truth,” Octavia Butler wrote, “is Change.” Standing still is a different type of risk: the type you take without choosing it. Of course, “not to decide is to decide,” as the theologian Harvey Cox wrote.
The movie Friday put the same idea in different words back in 1995. Craig’s father catches stray dogs for a living and wants Craig, fresh off losing his job, to apply. Craig tells him he ain’t trying to be no dog catcher. His father fires back:
“If you ain’t got nothing on the table, you ain’t gotta worry about catching a dog. You gotta worry about a dog catching your ass.”
To keep a dog from catching my ass, I run courage challenges each day: one act that takes nerve.
- The sales ask
- The hard conversation I’ve been ducking
- Pushing a run further than I’ve tried before
I chase risk before it can chase me.
Taking no risk is taking a risk. One you choose by not choosing.
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What’s one move you could make before the world makes it for you?
