Risk

Just an excerpt from Jon Acuff's Quitter that made me stop and think:

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Apathy is a good friend when opportunity stares you in the face and you're afraid to actually find out what would happen if you tried to follow through with a dream job or a desire. And it's a good friend because something weird happens when we step out for a big adventure. We start to ask ourselves the "what if" questions.
"What if I try and I fail and it turns out I'm not really a writer after all?"
"What if we have kids and I'm a horrible mother?"
"What if I start my own business and it turns out all these years I've been wrong about being a great entrepreneur?"

In those moments, we become obsessed with the fear of finding out what we are not. It reminds me of how Matt Damon's character describes why he is a murderous imposter in the movie The Talented Mr. Ripley. He says, "I always thought it'd be better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody." Apathy is ultimately about being a "fake somebody."

We're afraid of finding out what we're really made of so instead we end up making no decision because neutral is safe. We think that if we don't do anything, we won't make the wrong decision. But not doing anything is its own decision, and the odds of failure are horrible.

Let's pretend that you decide to pursue your dream job with all your heart. Let's say that, like me, you put all the chips in and move your family and change jobs and end relationships and start new ones in a new state. Five years later you look back on the decision and either it worked or it didn't. There will be shades of differentiation in there, but for the most part you'll either have succeeded (you made the right decision) or failed (you mace the wrong decision). So you have roughly 50 percent odds of things working out.

But nobody fears just making the wrong decision. Through the kaleidoscope we fear the worst possible outcome we can imagine - a series of interrelated failures, a spider web of screw-ups that collapses our entire being. When I play that game, I go from "mistake" to "hobo on the streets" in about five minutes. I imagine losing my job in some sort of spectacular way that prevents me from ever finding gainful employment again. I don't just get blacklisted in one industry; I manage to get barred from every industry on the planet. My family would leave me too because I'd be a hobo and they wouldn't want to be part of my new drifter lifestyle. Riding the rails and whatnot. I'd kick around the Pacific Northwest and try to become a glassblower or something, but that wouldn't work either. Ultimately I'd fall apart and people would use me as a cautionary tale of extreme potential gone to extreme waste.

The chances of that happening, of you or me really wasting our lives to that degree, are very, very slim. They're probably 1 percent. Maybe 2 percent if you already know a guy who's into glassblowing and lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Now let's say that your fear of answering "What if?" is massive. You're paralyzed by it and in order to avoid it you don't make any decision about pursing your dream. You now have a 100 percent chance of your dream not coming to fruition. People who do not attempt to recover their dreams fail 100 percent of the time.

So you have a 2 percent chance of horrific failure if you try and a 100 percent chance if you don't. Those are horrible odds, but maybe I over exaggerated and 2 percent is incredibly low. Let's pretend there's a 50 percent chance that your worst failure comes to fruition. Those odds are still better than not trying at all.

You might fail. By recovering your dream and running with it, risk runs with you. You could fall flat on your face. But I'd accept that risk a thousand times before I accepted the guarantee of failure of not trying.

Do the math and don't make the fear of failure an insurmountable obstacle.