Aversion To Risk is the Greatest Life-Trap!

We grow-up in a funny world where driving a car isn’t thought about. The capacity of everyone else’s driving ability is never questioned and yet there is only a single white line guiding all the traffic. Most would say that crossing the road is no big deal although in the US ‘jay-walking’ is a criminal offence. The consequences of mistake here are minimal yet can be fatal or luckily, only injurious. We think nothing of allowing our teenagers to learn to drive the most dangerous machine that most own in their lifetime without a second thought and maybe that’s a good thing. I just want to contrast that with what people see Poker as. Those that view Poker as gambling haven’t realised that risk assessment and accurate risk-taking are what define the growth areas in life and those that don’t take them, stay where they are. You had to take a risk in life when you asked your partner out, when you applied for that job that’s paying you, when you bought your house not knowing for definite that you’ll make all the payments for definite in the future. So why are we so blind to risk-taking?

You see the greatest problem isn’t risk. It’s imbalanced risk. That risk where the return isn’t worth the risk. If you know the return is far greater than the risk then you are going to take it. We all grow up in and among cars. Without knowledge about the car accident incident rate. We grow up with the belief that driving is a generally safe practice, and it is. The risk is our lives, but no one ever tells us this. We just know that it’s so small that we need not worry. So it baffles me that people don’t take more weighted and considered risk in their lives. Nothing is going to be riskier than your life so you can be free to take more considered risks right? Poker appears like too much of a risk to most. However, to the professionals at the table, Poker is one of the least risky things they can do. To them it’s simply turning up and taking the winnings that are owed to them for working on their game. The reason most don’t realise this is because of two things:

a) they were never actively encouraged to explore risk for if they did they would realise that Poker isn’t gambling for professionals who use a proven system; and

b) they were taught, quite wrongly, to avoid all ‘perceived risk’. I call this perceived risk, as I have exampled above, because everything in life that leads to something new starts with taking a form of risk.

People develop an aversion to risk and yet their lives are permeated with it. You can’t live your life without taking risk. You can live without awareness of where you and when you are in fact taking risk. When you put your money into stocks you are taking a risk that there isn’t an economic recession (which is currently on the cards); when you have a baby you are taking the risk that the mother will be healthy enough to survive (which has a much higher probability in modern times but wasn’t always the case); when you choose to do nothing you take the risk that the rest of the world will do and leaves what you thought of as a secure venture for dust (e.g. Blockbusters turned down Netflix and a year later filed for bankruptcy). Therefore, the greatest risk you can take may just turn out to be the greatest risk of them all!

To move forward we must remind ourselves and our brains regularly that: fear is almost always greater than the thing itself.

Thanks so much for reading. Have a great day!