RISK FOR A RICH LIFE

RISK FOR A RICH LIFE I’m in the risk business. The first thing I want to do is bust the myth that risk people want only to reduce risk. The real objective, and the value I will talk about here, is reducing the cost of risk. Because it is directly through personal risk that we discover new and stronger ideas for fuller, richer lives. None other than Ben Franklin said that while the Constitution allows us to pursue happiness, finding happiness is on us. That means taking measured risks.

However you define risk, one thing we can all agree on is that risk involves uncertainty, unpredictability, all that chaos that happens outside our own chaotic heads. To organize the chaos, we as humans develop and share ideas. You know, thoughts like Cognito, ergo sum. Today the world is changing faster than ever; it sometimes feels like the chaos is gaining, and in many ways, particularly with today's comlexities, it is.

Ideas occupy multiple broad spectra. Some ideas are foundational to humanity: It’s no coincidence that all the world’s major religions say murder is bad; stealing is bad; help the poor. Beyond these foundations, ideas iterate. Some are good: helping us create order, like pursuing the Common Good: good for its adherents, good for society. But bad ideas can misdirect us, divide us, and corral our thinking. Think cults. Think megalomanical autocrats. Ideologues murdered well over one hundred million innocent souls in the 20th century, often through people who weren’t born evil, but were swept up in ideological waves. To recognize ideological excess, it begins, as always, with ourselves.

First, we should recognize that if we view the world through too much of an ideological lens, we bend our perception of the world: We disparage people we don’t even know, expend tremendous emotional energy over events we don’t control, and place ourselves and others into ideological labels. But we’re human. Tribalism is baked into our DNA. We like our home teams. Today’s challenge? Confirmation Bias: you know, Republicans tune into Fox, and Democrats into CNN? And screen time! Consider this: every time you view a screen, you are absorbing someone else’s curated content. The result of today's social platforms whose business model is to gather and sell data, is deep cultural and social fragmentation; we call political opponents our enemies. And yet we're all Americans, pursuing similar dreams.

Today we face an information tsunami, and yet, we voluntarily subject ourselves to redundant information, siloing our ideas for navigating life. What a waste of our most valuable depleting resource, our time! One result of all this? Oxford Dictionaries named “Post-Truth” the word of the year in 2016. What a handicap, for ourselves, and for our society. Truth should be sought as an antidote to all this segmentation.

So what’s the answer to Tribalism? Polarization? To Post-Truth? One thing we know for sure in developing ideas for life: only our own personal experiences are unassailably credible to us. Only the things we see, touch and experience ourselves are absolutely reliable, incontrovertible, pure and unfiltered, in developing ideas for life. Reason itself is dependent upon valid evidence. Personal realities reveal pure truth. Everything else can be challenged.

Even foundational and trqditional ideas can be challenged. Don’t murder, don’t steal, help the poor. These ideas tend to hold up to personal experiences and our place within society. That’s why they endure. But beyond these foundations, it’s personal experiences that help us recognize good ideas from ideas that may misdirect us, benefiting someone else’s agenda.

I’ll give an example. Academia has been criticized, rightly in my opinion, for political myopia and loss of free speech on campus. In April 2018, Penn State told its Outing Club they couldn’t go outside any more, because it’s too risky! The students were never consulted. That’s myopia, Groupthink. Now I know, and I think most of you will agree, from my life in business and from the healthiest institutions I’ve been involved with, it’s precisely that uncomfortable mashing of disparate interests, different personalities, different life histories, arguing, negotiating, improving, and perhaps compromising and concurring, that yields the most durable agreements and sustainable progress.

The same principle applies to us as individuals: broader and varied personal experience, make us stronger, and more durable and resilient to inevitable external forces. Because every time you move your own ideological dial, you have to give up something you thought was true, replaced by something you now know to be true. Truth wins. We begin to accept change as personal evolution, with open eyes. Our personal ideas begin to see through the clutter, hear past the noise. We grow.

I know what you’re thinking: experiencing really new things, opening that door into the unknown unknown, is risky: risky to our emotional comfort, maybe to our bodies, and always to that valuable depleting resource, our time. But we often have to sacrifice something valuable to grow.

So let me get back to reducing the cost of risk. How can we lower the cost of opening that door into the chaos of unknown unknowns, and willingly walk the knife edge? Because, if we can reduce the cost of walking the knife edge, taking that trip into the unknown, maybe we will do it more.

Here’s my solution: It’s not complicated, no mystery. Just join someone who’s been there. Benefit from their experience to explore known unknowns. We can’t manage the risk of unknown unknowns, but known unknowns are manageable. And when we walk into unknown territory for ourselves, there’s no room for ideologies, for differences. It’s all real. These experiences are pure and unfiltered. And you’ll never know what they’ll reveal, until you are in it.

So take a walk on the wild side. Volunteer in a group to feed the homeless: you might learn something about mental health and drug addiction. Find someone to teach you how to play an instrument; you’ll discover a new slice of the vast world of music. If you’re a person of faith, take a deep dive with a priest, pastor, rabbi or imam… of another religion, and discover what they find so beautiful. These experiences bind us. If personal experiences are the gold standard of developing ideas to navigate life, then shared experiences with others are the platinum standard.

This talk is about Richness in Life, so we need to take one more step: Shared experiences have a corollary: open YOUR doors to others, maybe for someone who is poor …in spirit, because you’ve been down that path yourself. Mentor a business associate, coach kids, …whatever. When you guide someone down a wilderness path for them, to show them a path of discovery and beauty, you both have that. Broad, and varied personal experiences may be the oxygen of life, but relationships are the blood. Good ideas guide us for life, relationships and shared experiences let us explore the meaning of life.

In our professional lives, external demands force us to explore unknowns, which makes us grow. But these are not of our own choosing. External demands will change, or evaporate as we take different roles. We change jobs, business direction changes, new external forces push us around. We MUST make these demands on ourselves (and those closest to us, by the way), to explore our personal potential. A mentor of mine said to me once, “Throughout life, we change our habits, The key is deciding which habits we’ll have next month, next year, into an undiscovered future.”

We face a clear a choice: an easy path of secure comfort, of atrophy, or yielding to someone else’s demands. Or… taking personal risks, diving into new unknown territory, and growing. And discovering a life rich with new ideas, raw and unfiltered experiences, relationships bound by shared experience, and Rich Truth.

New experiences, shared with others, Reduced risk, Unlimited returns !

Note: This essay is intended to be delivered orally, in person, and was first delivered at a TEDx Talk at Deerfield Academy. https://youtu.be/DyAWXOpqtWw For my 40th college reunion, i presented a shorter version; a re-do (video) of this talk is presented here: https://youtu.be/5VfxmZ8zlfg I’ve presented variations on this same theme to the Norwell High School sophomore class, and more recently to a business network group. It’s my personal Weltanshauung.