How do you decide when a risk is worth it? Why do so many people tell you that you won’t succeed when you say you want to make the leap to a new career or life venture? Why do so many adults fear taking a risk or pursuing a dream? How do you cope with failure? How do you find a need for adventure at the age of 60?
Those were just some of the really interesting questions raised during my appearance yesterday on Minnesota Public Radio’s Midmorning show with Kerri Miller. (If you missed it, you can listen to a recording on MPR’s site.)
All those questions are, of course, one of the reasons I founded No Map. No Guide. No Limits. … to provide a space where questions and issues like that can be discussed. And they’re not easy to answer. But a couple more thoughts on those questions here, beyond what I said on the show. More will follow later.
How do you decide a risk is worth it? If you’re unhappy where you are, but the path you’d like to take is uncertain, and most likely difficult … how do you decide if it’s worth taking? Or when the right time to take it is?
Deciding if a risk is worth it or not is, of course, a deeply personal decision. One of the most significant points of a hero’s journey is making the commitment to embark on it … significant because of all the agony and balancing and letting go that represents. And nobody can answer or decide that one for you. Not only because you’re the one who will endure the consequences of the decision, but because everyone has a uniquely calibrated scale when it comes to evaluating risk and reward.
Roz Savage thinks that rowing across the Pacific is an acceptable balance of risk and reward. Former Chess Champion Garry Kasparov thinks that taking on Vladamir Putin as an opposition leader is an acceptable balance of risk and reward, even though his life is in danger, he’s been jailed more than once, and his quest is almost certain to fail. Mike Melville thought being the test pilot on Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne—the first civilian-built spaceship to reach space—represented an acceptable balance of risk and reward, even though he spun out of control more than two dozen times on his second flight. And yet for some people, leaving a steady paycheck in a recession is not an acceptable balance of those competing elements.
So I can only offer my own thoughts on the subject. Or, at least some of them, because the subject is far bigger than anyone could answer or cover in a single post. But my thoughts would include the following: life is short. If you’re pretty happy where you are, and the risks of changing seem high, it’s probably not worth it. But if your heart leaps at the idea of the new venture, and you feel an energy you haven’t felt in years … or if you know, without a doubt, that where you are is draining your heart and soul … then making the leap, hard and challenging as it might prove to be, might be the best thing you ever did.
To help in that decision, I generally write out the pros and cons of each choice on a piece of paper. I also ALWAYS come up with a plan A, a plan B, and a “if all else fails, or if worse comes to worst” plan of action. Circumstances will probably alter all of my initial plans —a new venture is always something you navigate one step at a time. But if you try to imagine the worst case, and come up with an emergency plan for handling it (even if it’s not a sure-fire fix), it can give you far more peace of mind in making the leap. It’s also good planning. After that, know that you’re going to have to keep your wits about you and figure the rest out as you go. (The “build your wings on the way down” idea we talked about on the show.)
Making a leap, after all, is not the same thing as acting on a reckless impulse. At some point, every pilot has to put the throttle forward and commit to leaping off the earth, hoping the plane will fly—but every pilot also carefully pre-flights the airplane, and creates a flight plan for their intended journey, first.
But in the course of the decision-making … ask yourself this: does the path I’m on, or the path I’m contemplating taking, have heart? (If this concept doesn’t make sense to you, download my Surviving Uncertainty e-book and read pages 71 – 74.) The concept of a path with a heart is one of the powerful concepts and images in Carlos Castaneda’s 1970s famous Don Juan series. As Castaneda put it:
“A path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you to do. But your decision to keep on the path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition.
“All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. In my own life I could say I have traversed long, long paths, but I am not anywhere. My benefactor’s question has meaning now. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good. If it doesn’t, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere, but one has heart, the other doesn’t. One makes for a joyful journey; the other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong, the other weakens you. The trouble is that nobody asks the question; and when a man finally realizes that he has taken a path without a heart, the path is ready to kill him. At that point, very few men can stop to deliberate, and leave the path.”
Everyone has to make their own decision about what paths and risks to take. But for me, as Castaneda said, “there is only the traveling on paths that have heart. Any path that may have heart. … And there I travel looking, looking breathlessly.”
More on the other questions later …
