It was while I was typing up my thoughts in response to The Art of Innovation that I realized that, somewhere along the way, I seem to have developed an aversion to risk. When I was reading Kelley's thoughts on prototyping and product development, I kept finding myself asking "but how do you know which ideas are the ones worth expanding on?" I realized that even after finishing the book, I still didn't feel confident that I could forge ahead on some ideas and leave others behind without worrying that I'd chosen the wrong ones.
Howard Gardner's piece felt almost too on-target when I watched it soon after finishing the book. Among many other topics, he touched on the idea that the current generation is risk-averse, both in school and in life. Rather than putting ourselves out there first and gauging the response, he says, we want to know how we'll be judged and what metrics are being used to measure us. If I was worried about it in myself, and others thought that it was a growing trend, how could I combat it? How can we work against this trend in general?
The first answer I found is to look for inspiration from others - look to those people I admire, the people operating in business or in art (or both, or neither) who put themselves forward and take risks on ideas that sometimes pan out and sometimes don't. This is a list that I'll continue to build on as I move forward, and I expect I'll be looking back to it every so often as I try to build a new habit in myself of accepting risk.
- Out of every four restaurants Gordon Ramsay has opened, one of them has failed.
- Author J.K. Rowling left behind a successful YA fantasy series to publish books in adult fiction, one of them under a pseudonym.
- One of my colleagues in Advancement is leaving the office after a decade of service to the school in order to pursue her own business.
- My parents owned four different businesses over the course of their careers, one of them an outright financial failure. But they rebuilt and moved on to new opportunities.
- Steve Jobs came back to a company that had stagnated in an attempt to get it back in gear, and succeeded.
If I look to these people as inspiration when I'm hesitant to take a risk, perhaps it will help me to take the necessary leap.
What risk-takers inspire you?
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