Do you remember when you first took a big risk in your life?

Have you seen any person walking out of a ship as an underwater welder to rescue a sinking ship?
Of course, less likely.
It’s impossible without any prior training, and if it is done without training then it would be a senseless act.
But for a maritime army engineer, this could be a normal task.
The bottom line is the same task could be risky for some but normal for others.
The whole intention of this background is: risk clearly is personal.
Risk questions us who we are, what we do, how we prepare tasks, and most importantly, what do we see twenty to thirty year from now in our life?

Do you remember when you first took a big risk in your life?
How did it feel for you?
It’s quite the challenging experience for me when I was learning how to drive a motorbike in my upper teen age.
I wrote every single step of what to do in a paper and memorized.
I drove the motorbike almost half a mile on the first day without anybody’s assistance, just following the memorized steps very carefully.
Nothing serious happened to me that day, next day I did the same. In a week, I became at least a moderate driver without taking any help from another person. Fortunately, I didn’t harm myself physically, but I still remember it was a big risk.
I don’t recommend taking this kind of physically challenged risk to anybody, but it was an amazing mental experience for me.

Normal experience becomes mesmerizing when we are immersed in risk.
Before the pandemic, I had a discussion at the dining table of one of my friends’ homes.
I asked one of my friends, “Do you like gambling?”
He immediately replied, “No.”
He added that he has not received any ounce of luck in his whole life in any of his past endeavors.
I asked him, “Do you want to own a casino?”
He immediately replied, “Oh, yeah, of course.”
I was thinking to myself why people hate gambling but the same people love to own casinos.
The fundametnal is we enjoy other people taking risks but don’t want to take ourselves.
Even though owning a casino is still a risky bet but far less riskier than handling blackjack on the table as an individual player.
The casino owner has an edge with percentages so this is not considered risky.
They also sell their play book in their gift shops and other players buy it to win.
Casino owners know very well that when the play book doesn’t work.
And surprisingly, you can guess why drinks are free on the casino table, owning a casino doesn’t belong to risk-taking.

The underlying reason is that we are not taught to take risks in normal life.
Society doesn’t teach us to take risks, society teaches us to avoid risks.
The only way we learn to take risks is by taking more risks with minimum failures. We also stop scaring ourselves from taking risks.

It is quite common that we feel good after getting success and not so good after failures.
Life is a probabilistic game, and risks are inevitable in life.
They are not necessarily indications of failures. If we think risk-taking as an unnatural game, then we will certainly truncate success too.

If we want greater success in life, we need to take more risk; if we don’t want to take more risk, we will be mediocre or average.
Risk is everywhere no matter what we do in our life. I vividly remember the fire in a house of my friend; he lost everything he owned.
Many years ago, one of my friends was going to the office in the morning in New Jersey, and he was hit by a truck on zebra crossing and he died on the spot. My hands are shivering recalling that accident.

In the United States, around 50 percent of all marriages will end in divorce or separation.
This is quite shocking.
We don’t realize that marriage is also a kind of risk if we don’t know how to grow and nurture a family and a relationship.
Most of us try to predict how the person we are dating will turn out as a spouse based on how he or she speaks to us or how he or she holds a knife and a fork to eat chicken pieces during dating days.

This tells me RISK is not only a four letter word, we have to learn how to live with it.

Risk taking is a part of education in our learning process.
Nobody gets success just by taking risks.
We have to spend a hefty sum of time around risk, we have to think big around risk, and most importantly, we have to work subconsciously 24/7 around risk to get anticipated results.

Are you willing to undertake risk?
A fulfilling lifestyle integrates the strength of risk-taking. Some of life’s greatest fulfillment comes from accepting risks in multiple forms.

The average person is a risk-avoider who wakes up in the morning, has coffee and breakfast, goes to the office, has lunch, comes back home in the evening, has dinner, watches TV, and sleeps.
The cycle continues. If he or she has some extra dollars, put it in the saving account.
He or she never takes risks in life.
There is nothing wrong with this habit but this cycle never revolutionizes and transcends the society.

There are some other people like investors and traders, venture capitalists, inventors and entrepreneurs, who keep grinding on odd hours, and most importantly take immense risks putting themselves outside the box.
If they fail also, they learn from it and take another calculated risk, and eventually succeed. They know how to create emotional diversification on risk.

People grow in exponential ways when they place themselves in risky environments that enhance their strengths.
Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg, they all took immense risk, they dropped out from graduate school, they went from a stagnant environment to one that multiplied their strengths.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, dropped out from graduate school and turned his dorm room project into one of the top multi billion dollar companies on the planet.
He is the most successful entrepreneur of our time, he became the synonym of innovation, vision, and leadership.
He is certainly a risk taker.
Only risk taking taught him self-mastery and the process of improvement in the journey of his entrepreneurship.

The truth is that when we age, we become less enthusiastic, less optimistic in our goals, and a lot weaker in risk taking.
We aren’t necessarily against taking risk but we simply lack the beauty of risk-taking.
How we relate to risks very much impacts our life experience.
Our brain grows when we compel it to learn something out of reach at the moment.
By the process of neurogenesis, we develop new brain cells that catalyze new learning.
Risky tasks allow us to make mistakes, but that also challenges us how to move forward.

From my motorbike driving experience, I can tell that risk-taking is about developing positive emotional experience.
It invites exercise of hidden talents and skills to transform the process.
We definitely become idealistic thinkers to realistic thinkers, we learn to challenge the status quo, and move the ball forward.

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, was admitted to Stanford University for his PhD but left after only two days, deciding to test his entrepreneurial spirit.
He never returned to finish his PhD at Stanford.
He also took immense risk to venture out entrepreneurship instead of a relatively stable PhD path.

Taking risks helps us to build the best within us that gives us energy, that also allows us to persist beyond unimaginables and unthinkables.

Many people are passionate in their profession but very few dedicate their time for reflective thinking. Reflective thinking is a tool for risk takers.
Reflective thinking clears the mind and pushes the limits of action.
This is also a cognitive exercise in some way.

One great experience of reflective thinking I realized personally is when I myself became a dad to my kids. How much care and sacrifice my parents did for me, I understood and felt the importance of parents in life on a deeper level than my existing understanding.

We all develop our strengths by using both physical and mental exercise in fresh and stimulating ways.
Physical and mental exercise both stimulate our core talents, skills, and interests.
This might be one reason after finishing five miles running, I become more motivated to run seven miles even though my stamina may not allow me to do that.
Without fresh inputs producing better stamina for my body, I risk to weaken my strengths leading to the concept- if I don’t use my body with respect, I lose my body.

We all say that profit is the single most essential ingredient in a successful business, a positive cash flow is equally essential for our finances. We should not deviate our business which hampers the cash flow.
Similarly, we should not take any risk that crumbles our life in a second.
The proportion of risk comes with research, preparation, and analysis.
We must complete the sentence, “I want to take risks to accomplish ……”
We, of course, need time, knowledge, and discipline to take risks in life.
Risk in itself should be our plan.

Only experience doesn’t take us to expertise if we don’t do research and don’t show willingness to take calculated risks.
E. Paul Torrance has beautifully expressed in his book, The Nature of Creativity, “Don’t be afraid to “fall in love with” something and pursue it with intensity.”
Creativity follows passion and deliberate passion attracts risks.
The most essential part of life is to make sure we are spending sufficient time studying risks, not just studying safe routes and safe destinations.
Amazingly enough, not every risk in life leads to success.
The risk-setup is a probability outcome that, if followed over time, should lead to lasting success in life.
Risks may take us to loss and frustration; but it is how we react to them determines our future success.

Finally respect your limitations, never test the depth of the water with both feet.
This is not called risk-taking, this is called pure idiocy.

Thank you for your time.
-Yam Timsina