“Security is mostly a superstition… Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.” Helen Keller
One day the turkey wakes up and it’s Thanksgiving.
I left a stable consulting job in 2017. The pay was good. The work was fine. That was the problem. I was getting too comfortable. I could have stayed and pushed further there, but I wanted to spend my time learning and exploring.
Nassim Taleb uses the turkey to explain how risk accumulates. The turkey gets fed each day. Each day confirms the belief that life is good. Confidence builds. Then, without warning, the pattern breaks.
Risk doesn’t announce itself. It piles up quietly, grain by grain, then hits all at once.
We tend to think that “avoiding risk” keeps us safe. Risk is always there. Skip the small, survivable doses and it piles up into one hit that takes you out.
So dance with it. Take small risks often. Two steps up and a jump beats ten stories and a fall. Each small fall builds the skill to survive a catastrophic fall. Skip the small falls and the catastrophic fall finds you with no skill at all.
The snow is piling up on knowledge workers right now. AI handles more of the work each quarter. The role still exists. The paycheck still clears. Each month confirms the belief that things are fine. The turkey is getting fatter.
- Travel agents booked everyone’s flights and hotels until the internet let people do it themselves.
- Video store clerks ran packed Friday nights until streaming arrived and the storefronts went dark.
- A New York taxi medallion, the license to put a cab on the road, cost more than a house until ride-hailing apps made it nearly worthless.
The jobs looked stable to the last day. The ground had already moved.
Survival of the fittest leaves off the part that matters: fittest to the environment. The environment keeps moving. Stand still and the gap between you and your environment grows quietly.
Our relationships, careers, health and skills work the same way. A small discomfort now keeps you in step. Skip it and the gap widens until it breaks.
- Relationships: the weekly check-in where you say the hard thing. Avoid it and you’re signing divorce papers at year ten.
- Career: the biweekly one-on-one where the tension gets aired. Duck it and your best teammate quits before you see it coming.
- Health: the daily run or the 10,000 steps, even when it’s raining. Put it off and the heart attack arrives without warning.
- Skills: the hours each week on a new language, an improv class or a portfolio piece you ship on LinkedIn. Skip them and the next layoff has your name on it.
The turkey never sees Thanksgiving coming. Dance with risk or wait for it to hit all at once.
🦃
Where is risk accumulating in your life right now?
