Right Risk: 10 Powerful Principles for Taking Giant Leaps with Your Life

To live is to risk. Risk-taking is as essential to life as breathing. It is the oxygen of such things as innovation, entrepreneurialism, leadership, wealth creation, and high adventure. Without risk, there can be no scientific progress, economic expansion, or community activism. At a more personal level, remove risk and there is no personal growth, career advancement, or spiritual development (faith, after all, is a big risk). Personally and collectively, all progress, advancement, and momentum depend on risk. Like air, it is both nourishing and life-sustaining. And, like change, risk is constant, inescapable, and inevitable.

To risk is to live. As a vehicle to personal progress, taking risks is the surest way to get from where you are to where you want to be. The most fulfilling times in your life—the times you felt most alive—have undoubtedly been when you surprised yourself by doing something you never imagined you could, something hard, something scary.

Though most of us have enjoyed the accompanying rewards of an intelligently taken risk, most of us have crashed-’n-burned under an ill-considered one as well. By definition, to face risk is to be vulnerable and exposed to harm. Consequently, we spend a lot of time trying to avoid risk by “playing it safe.” Chances are, anytime you have passed up a big opportunity, stayed in an unsatisfying situation, or failed to stick up for yourself, avoiding risk had a lot to do with your behavior.

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In a world that continually reminds us about how unsafe it is, it is difficult to maintain a “play it safe” approach. From terrorist threats, to stock market gyrations, to corporate implosions, we are buffeted by the reckless risks of others. In an increasingly compressed and frenetic world, we are like billiard balls being smacked around in somebody else’s pool-hall hustle.

Ironically, those who play it safe may be in the greatest danger. When we don’t take risks we get stuck in a rut of safety. Over time, we become trapped inside our own life, like a pearl confined to its shell. Life becomes stale and boring. We grow resentful at ourselves for letting our grand passions languish. We tell ourselves, there’s got to be something more out there for me. But we know we’ll never find it unless we take more risks.

Risk or Be Risked Upon

Given risk’s inevitability and its central role in living a fulfilled life, combined with the realities of an increasingly risk-intense world, knowing how to take risks should be a part of everyone’s core life curriculum. Rather than let risks be inflicted on you by happenstance, today’s realities dictate that you learn to initiate them yourself. As a friend of mine likes to say, “You’re either part of the bulldozer, or you’re part of the pavement.”

Fortunately, “being part of the bulldozer” does not mean you have to act like it. Unlike many of the risks that are imposed on you from the outside, the risks you take can be anchored to steadfast principles that serve to strengthen your life instead of undermine it.

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What This Book Is About

Right Risk is about taking more deliberate and intentional risks in an increasingly complex world. It is about all the things that happen to you when you are planning for, engaging in, or running from, a risk. It aims to answer such questions as: How do I know which risks to take and which to avoid? How do I balance the need to take more risks with the need to preserve my safety? How do I muster up the courage to take risks when it is so much easier not to? How do I confront all those people who keep telling me what a mistake it would be to take the risk? And, most importantly, How do I make risk-taking less of an anxiety-provoking experience? (You’d probably take more risk if you just plain enjoyed it more, right?)

Right Risk aims to help you make smart and courageous choices, by taking risks that most reflect your personal value system, or what I call “Right Risks.” Right Risks are as unique to the risk-taker as a fingerprint. They are those that, regardless of outcomes, are always deemed successful because they are taken with a clean conscience and clear calling. They are at once deliberate, life-affirming, and closely aligned with one’s deepest core values. Right Risks stand for something.

We face Right Risk opportunities when deciding whether or not to get married, have children, or confront a loved one. Also whenever we are considering joining a social cause, converting to a different religious denomination, switching political parties, or marrying someone outside our own race or ethnicity. In our work lives we face Right Risk decisions when we grapple with whether to sign on for a position that is beyond our skills, accept an overseas assignment, expose a company impropriety, or elevate a groundbreaking but tradition-defying idea. For better or for worse, the choices we make in such instances can have enduring consequences.

If you are still unclear as to what this book is about, take a moment and reflect on these two things:

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The greatest risk you’ve ever taken.
The risk you’ve always wanted to take but have been too afraid to do so.
In other words, this book is about you and the big risk decision that you are grappling with. To risk or not to risk, that is always the question.

What This Book Is Not About

Much of what has been written about risk deals with risk management and comes from actuaries and statisticians, primarily in the insurance industry. In that arena, risk is a four-letter word, a thing to be avoided, controlled, or reduced. It is dealt with rationally, impersonally, and with a great deal of caution. But it is a mistake to universally apply the risk management ethos to every risk endeavor. The question is: why are we taking all our advice about risk-taking from people who notoriously avoid risk? When we do, we put an overemphasis on the word risk often to the exclusion of the word taking, and our posture becomes one of risk avoidance. Isn’t it time for a book about risk-taking written from a risk-taker’s vantage point?

Right Risk offers a new set of risk-taking principles that aim to balance caution with courage, sensibility with spiritedness. Unlike risk management books, the emphasis here is on risk-taking as a verb, an action, something you do. Thus Right Risk comes with a new presupposition: that risk-taking is every bit as important, if not more so, than risk-mitigation.

How I Became Acquainted with Risk

I am an ordinary man who spent seven years taking extraordinary risks. From 1984 to 1991, leaping from risk’s precipice was my job—literally. During that time, I performed over 1500 high dives from heights that scaled to 100 feet, while traveling throughout the world as a member of the U.S. High Diving Team. I am not an Olympian. Contrary to popular belief, high diving is not an Olympic sport. In the Olympics, the competition stops at 10 meters, roughly 33 feet. Our lowest high dive (to use an oxymoron) began at 60 feet, and most were performed at the life-threatening height of 27 meters, or roughly 100 feet. Last time I checked, the world record stood at 187 feet. The diver, a Swiss named Oliver Farve, broke his back in two places. High diving was an “extreme” sport before the term was coined.

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The high dive was not the only risk my comrades and I took as part of an aquatic entertainment production. We also performed dangerous springboard stunts called dillies, dives that two divers perform together. Dillies are aerial acrobatics, like the “Horse & Rider,” where one diver does a reverse somersault landing on...