Why You Should Take Risks, and Why Failure Isn’t That Bad
Why are we terrified of taking risks when the consequences are usually so small?
Risk taking in elder care
Atul Gawande, in his book Being Mortal, tells the story of one doctor who was willing to take risks. Those risks changed the lives of his patients:
Dr. Bill Thomas is a geriatrician who fundamentally shifted the approach used for care giving in a nursing home. Thomas was a farmer and an ER doctor when he took his first job in geriatrics at Chase Memorial Nursing Home.
The gloomy mood of the residents and depressing feel of the facility inspired Thomas to take a radical approach to how care was provided. He wanted to introduce plants, animals, and children into the environment, and he proposed to fund this plan through a grant from New York State.
Thomas approached the management team with his plan: live plants in every room, two dogs, four cats, 100 parakeets, and on-site daycare for the employees’ children.
The plan was met with opposition: regulations only allowed for one dog or one cat, and birds were strictly prohibited!
By some miracle, Thomas convinced the management team to let him try his outlandish plan. They submitted the application, traveled to the state capital to make their case, and to everyone’s surprise, they were awarded the grant and given permission to bring the animals!
Getting permission was only the first step. Implementation was the next hurdle to surmount.
On the day the delivery man arrived with 100 parakeets, the cages were yet to be delivered, so he released the birds into a closed room and left.
When the cages arrived, they weren’t assembled. Thomas had never built bird cages, but he and several others spent hours putting them together, catching the birds, and delivering the birds to the residents’ rooms.
The challenges were ever present, such as a late night call from a nurse who refused to cleanup a pile of dog poop, but Thomas and his team navigated all the problems.
The results: a dramatic increase in happiness, will to live, and general positive mood of the residents.
A study examined the results of Thomas’ efforts at Chase Memorial. The researchers found that prescriptions (particularly psychotropic drugs) for residents at Chase dropped to half that of the residents at the control nursing home.
They also found that deaths decreased by 15%. These were life changing results stemming from Thomas’ willingness to take a risk and do something bold.
The upside of most calculated risks, as Thomas found, overshadows the downside of potential failure. And not wanting to take a risk is often enabled by the excuses we make for ourselves.
This doesn’t just apply to doctors. Let’s take a look at some examples from an average Joe…
Success is great
Three years ago, I knew nothing about real estate investing.
I spent a year and a half listening to every real estate podcast and reading every book I could find. There came a point when I realized I didn’t know everything, but I had enough knowledge to give it a shot. With a partner, I took the risk and bought my first investment property.
Fast forward another year and a half, and we continue to build a successful real estate business. We have four properties, and our annual revenues are quickly approaching our full-time salaries.
Has every deal been smooth sailing? Of course not.
Has every tenant been wonderful? Not even close.
Have we learned some hard lessons? You bet.
Even with those road bumps, my partner and I still consider our business a huge, even life changing, success. It’s a success we never would have realized without taking the first small risk.
Failure is…not that bad
Now for the failure.
The same business partner and I saw a weakness in young adults that we wanted to address. We realized how much we had developed since leaving college, and we wanted to help high school seniors learn these lessons earlier than we did.
Our answer was to write a book. We kept it short,conversational, and packed with the valuable skills, tips, and tricks that we used every day.
Our goal was to get this book into the hands of every high school senior, on their graduation day. But our plan had several problems:
A book is not the best way to convey important lessons to 18-year-old high schoolers.
We did not know the first thing about marketing.
We put hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars into a project that ultimately did not succeed.
We sold about 800 books in our first year, barely enough to cover our costs, and certainly not enough to make any worthwhile profit.
After the 2017 high school graduation, we decided to pack it in.
The risk involved with this endeavor was the money we fronted to print the books and the time we spent that could have been spent with friends, family, or even working somewhere else.
The project was a failure from a business perspective.
The work required to make any real money was more than we could sustain, and the impact we hoped to have on young adults was probably more of an idealized vision than a tangible reality.
Despite the risks, we sold enough books to cover our costs, so we lost no money.
As for the time spent behind the computer, on the phone with printers, and driving hours to meet with principals, it wasn’t wasted.
We became better writers, we learned to format a book,negotiate contracts, and even speak persuasively to educators more than twice our age. We were continuing our education.
We took a risk and failed from a business perspective, but that risk turned out to be zero financial loss and major personal gain.
Dr. Thomas took a chance and hit a home run in his field. I’ve taken chances that resulted in success and failure, and in both instances, I gained much more than I lost.
What risk have you been considering? Does it feel a little less risky now?
