The Risk Taker That Sleeps Inside

Circa 2015, and I have a steady job in a good company. Salary is not great, but pays the bills and the job is fine; I get to learn some new things here and there. Nothing is especially wrong with anything, only this feeling of “end of an era” that is growing on me. Nothing I hadn’t felt before when staying for several years on the same job doing the same over and over, once the most significant challenges have been overcome.
Now, I could have tried to find a job in, I don’t know, oil and gas, or telecoms, or basically anything where my experience could have been useful. A career refreshment of sorts, just to keep things going. That would have been more me. I’m more for measured, calculated change.
But no. Instead, I did something riskier. I took a job on the other side of the world in a very early-stage endeavor. I sold all my stuff in roughly two months and I flew to a completely unknown place to me like Finland. As “thoughtless” as it may sound, I do remember computing the whole thing carefully, fully aware that it was risky and fully aware of the many ways it could end in total disaster. But I still went for it. Why? I saw that everything was to be done. Everything was a huge TBD; a blank canvas. The risk was high, yes, but so was the potential reward.

I seldom surprise myself. I mean, I feel I am more or less in command of my life. But that time I did surprise myself. As if someone else, someone more risk-friendly than me, would have taken the helm and placed a bet I would have never dared to place myself.

I have never considered myself an adventurous person. On the contrary, I have always been on the conservative side of the spectrum in terms of how I make decisions and how I perceive risk and its consequences. A certified overthinker, I tend to draw too many scenarios in my head before making a move, including very unlikely scenarios that could never happen.

Interestingly enough, I wasn’t even done surprising myself. A few years after that bold decision I made, I raised the stakes again. My job was once more stable, nice, and comfy, but the same aura of end of cycle crippled me, and the risk taker that inhabits me—and I didn’t know it did—woke up and made me arson it all and restart everything from scratch. I quit, and I joined something even riskier and at an earlier stage than before. And now I also had a family and a loan under my responsibility. But there I went. Soon, I found myself registering a company and renting office space, touring IKEA to buy cheap office chairs and desks that I had to assemble. But the potential rewards peaked: the sole idea of constructing something as complex as a little society out of practically nothing was too appealing to look away.
Mind that I am in no way whatsoever romanticizing these two professional pirouettes of mine as easy stuff. I’m only sparing the details for the sake of brevity, but in both cases, it took an insane amount of effort of many to bend the odds off from collision course, and a good dose of luck as well.

Daniel Kahneman, who sadly recently passed away, used to say that “a stupid decision that works out well will be remembered as brilliant”. Sure, it worked out for me (at least thus far), but I do not think of this as brilliance. I still ponder what went in my brain to flip the switch from “risk averse” to “risk taker” in such a way not only once, but twice. Granted, it’s not that I was quitting my job in engineering to become a comedian or to pursue a career as an exotic dancer. But still, I stepped quite far off my comfort zone.

It may sound a bit schizo, but we may have dormant sides of our personality traits that are lurking there, waiting to wake up. They may just sleep forever, or they may, under the right circumstances, take the wheel. There is a chance we can surprise ourselves by doing something that our typical “selves” would never do.

Icarus was a Greek mythological figure who tried to escape imprisonment in Crete with his father Daedalus, using wings Daedalus crafted out of feathers and wax. Daedalus warned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun or too low to the sea. Overwhelmed with the excitement of flying, Icarus flew much too high, and as a result, the wax melted and his feathers fell off. Icarus plunged into the sea and to a certain death. The story of Icarus is often used to signify the dangers of over-ambition and blindness against risk and its consequences.

Perhaps the key is to always steer clear from flying too close to the Sun.