What is Risk Anyway?

Date: Tuesday, October 9^th, 2012

It has been about a month since I started this project on risk and performance anxiety, and quite a few questions have come up for me that I’d like to explore in this post. Mainly, I keep wondering a) what is risk? And b) what risks are good risks to take?

So what is risk? Wikipedia provided some insight:

Risk is “A situation involving exposure to danger” where “a choice having an influence on the outcome exists (or existed).” This implies that risks are closely tied to making decisions, where values and uncertainties are assessed in order to make the optimal choice. Risk assessment, however, can never be wholly objective, because of cognitive and cultural bias, as well as other factors. In terms of calculating risk, our limited minds cannot fathom the likelihood of some probablities, and so we think of them in disproportionate ways. For example, it is much more likely to be injured in a car accident rather than to be bitten by a shark, but people are generally more afraid of sharks than automobiles.

My personal definition of risk is (possible gain/value)X(what’s at stake).

The higher the stakes the more ‘risky’ the venture.

So that got me thinking – if I don’t want to put things such as personal health or the safety of others etc… at stake, what should I put at stake? After some thought, I’ve decided that the only thing that is really worth putting at stake is ego, or one’s vision of oneself. Of course, saying that I am only risking ego is oversimplifying all of the possible losses I might endure from putting ego at risk. For example, ego is connected to performance and confidence and demeanor and many other things, so by saying ‘ego’ I really mean all of the things connected to it as well.

My conclusion is that, from now on I want to ask myself - What do I want to do or gain, and how much am I willing to risk my ego?