Half of me is bored to death by the word “risk”, having heard it in its’ Project Managementy, Corporatey jargon context so many times. I am currently working through a training course for the PMP, and the topic of “Risk Management” is a major component of the training. Don’t yawn just yet. A few extra gears began spinning as my mind wandered through a lecture on the tools and techniques used by PMs to manage project risk.
If I’m going to do more than mediocre work as a PM I must get creative and engage more of my mind. I’m a learner, a thinker, an idea guy. That is why my Substack is called Ideation for crying out loud! In a counterintuitive way, the more work my brain does to understand something, the better I’ll learn it. I suspect this is true for all of us. Ex: if you want to learn times-tables, its better to understand number theory in a broader sense, to understand addition, subtraction, and division. It’s better to learn all of it in a web of interconnected and mutually supporting concepts. If we are fed easy problems all day, non-challenging information to quickly digest, we won’t really expand our mental capacity. It’s why all the mind numbing social media meat wagons are making us dumber. They require less mental engagement. The smaller the average mental withdrawal our routine activities take, the less capacity we have to spend higher mental prices for better quality assets. See my post on Attention.
Risk, in the corporate context, is sterilized, digitized, distant, financial, abstract, control focused. It’s all left brain. Risk, in the personal context, is dynamic, enticing, scary, real, rewarding, dangerous, and generally found in the realm of the intuitively open right brain. I’ve recently been going through an overhaul of my beliefs around risk from this more personal sense. I have made a series of safe moves throughout the last handful of years, and I’m pretty disappointed with the results. Let me explain.
2008. I was, for the second time, at the All-State Honor Band. I carried my euphonium with unwarranted confidence. The year before I had won second chair in the second tier band (meaning I was only 4 places from the first chair in the first band AKA: best musician in the state). Second chair in the second band was already the best anyone had ever done in my hometown high school music program.
I’m not bragging, I promise. I’m setting the stakes.
Certainly I stood to beat my previous year’s performance with flying colors. I would crush my audition and maybe even get first chair in the Wind Ensemble. I dreamed of the reactions from my private instructor and my high school band director. You probably have a pretty good idea as to what happens next. I sit for my audition, and when asked to play various scales, my mind goes completely blank. I barely even understand what they’re asking, let alone remember the proper note sequence for the B# melodic minor scale. I fumble through the audition with a mix of muscle memory and shame flushed cheeks. Thank God the judges are behind a curtain and can’t watch me fail so miserably.
I knew the audition was garbage, but I was so blindsided by the blank out that I desperately clung to the illusion that maybe I didn’t do as poorly as I thought. I waited out the next couple hours trying to distract myself with small talk. When the list was finally posted, my illusions melted and I was crushed. I got a chair lower than the previous year. That may sound like a small thing to you, but, if so, you’re probably using logic and reason (logic would say, “wow, even though you felt like you completely failed your audition, you still got 5th place out of 12.” Or “Hey, you made it to All-State, so either way you’ve proved you’re among the best, regardless of which chair you got.”) All my expectations were aimed at a stellar performance, and the full momentum of my hopes crashed against the stone wall of failure (real or imagined). The rest of that evening I was on the verge of throwing up, agonizing over the inescapable reality of my disastrous performance.
The feeling of failure was acute. I made a vow with myself in response, a promise, a strategy to mitigate risk. I would never, ever, get my hopes up so high. I would become dispassionate, and thereby immune to the risk that strongly desiring an outcome exposed me to.
More or less that is the vibe I adopted moving forward. And, guess what? It worked. By deliberately tamping down any eagerness, any zeal, any strong yearning for a goal, I was able to get second chair in the Wind Ensemble the next year (not first chair, but hey, I didn’t really care about the results anyway!). I was able to get a nearly full-ride scholarship to the University of Michigan for Euphonium Performance. No sweat, didn’t really try that hard. I guess that was nice, though. But the safety I created, shielding myself from the risk of really hoping to succeed at something, trickled down into more of my life than I had bargained for.
You might point out that this strategy for coping with the risk and failure has some obvious downsides. You’re right, again. In fact, throughout my collegiate experience my soul constantly snagged against the rougher edges of this approach. I protected myself from wanting success, so, surprise surprise, I didn’t work for success either. In contrast to my earlier years of academic enthusiasm, I began to loose the motivation to really learn. This was especially true in my musicology classes, where we learned music history and the personalities that have shaped the music we know and love today. I couldn’t muster up any particular interest in the topic. The armor of carelessness was far from static; it grew, metastasized, and began cooling other interests and endeavors. It became harder to try to succeed at anything. No no, not only did I not try, I actively sabotaged success. Watch this tour de force of stupidity…
My excellent professor of Euphonium and Tuba, Professor Fritz Kaenzig (Lord bless him, what a true teacher), worked tirelessly with me. He saw my potential and did everything he could to elevate it, direct it, and expose it to the proper channels of endeavor. In one particular case, my Junior year, he required me to submit a recording for a soloist competition. I hated this. I had to pay for both the pianist who accompanied me and the final recording. I made a small fuss about how I didn’t have any money and that is why I didn’t want to do it. That was an unfortunate lie of necessity, a contrivance to shield and preserve my emotional equilibrium in the face of the trap of risk of failure that this soloist competition presented. It didn’t feel like a lie at the time; it felt like a desperately warranted action of self-preservation. Nevertheless, my hand was forced. I begrudgingly made the recording, and Professor Kaenzig noted that it was of exceptional quality.
I had the CD, now. I took it back with me to my dorm building. Before going up to my room, I sat a while in the cold concrete stairwell, the perfect echo chamber for my twisted thoughts. Then I deliberately smashed the CD and threw it in the trash. It didn’t make me feel better, but at least my strategy for avoiding risk was preserved. In the coming weeks Kaenzig would frequently ask if I’d heard anything back from the organization that put on the competition. I always said no, I hadn’t. He was shocked. He couldn’t believe it! And, I think he may have suspected that I never sent it in. I’d become a saboteur, a spy carefully positioned in my own head to block any advancement.
I hate writing this, to be honest. I’ve only told a handful of people about this story. It’s a silly story. It is regrettable. It is sad, to be sure, but I’m not writing it find sympathy. I’m reckoning with the cost of my strategy to deal with the risk of failure. As my friend Phillip recently stated, I have paid high costs for a low risk strategy. I’m doing some Jordan Peterson level self-evaluation so that I can make different decisions in the future.
In the last few years, since marriage, kids, house, etc., I’ve begun wrestling with all this. Even I am beginning to feel the cost of this strategy. One way that cost is revealed is in the erosion the ability to focus. The absence of a productive anticipation of some good outcome in the future leads to a slow unravelling of the need to discipline focus toward beneficial pursuits. How can I even know what is beneficial if I don’t have a clear vision of what I want out of the future?
When I think about my beautiful and strong willed girl, my energetic and dramatic baby boy, I wonder what example I’m living out for them. Do I have a vision for the future that inspires me, a vision that forges a future into the unknown large enough to do justice to the size of their own importance in my heart?
Life is whittling away. 16 years, poof. Self-preservation is no longer an attractive motivation. I have others to think about, now. My mental map of the world, and my role in it, is being redrafted based on new findings. Like a root bound plant, I’m in need of repotting. The old pot must be shattered. Some knotted up roots must be cut. A whole new way of conceiving of goals and risks must be adopted if I am to grow.
My most popular post to date, Maps of Meaning, and my latest two, Attention and Facing Death, all cohere around the same theme. What is the best way to make sense of the unknown? How do you keep your focus engaged in meaningful enterprise? What stance enables you to defeat anxiety even in the face of death? How can you stretch yourself into the unknown despite risks? The unknown is fraught with both promise and threat, and you cannot predict which blessing or catastrophe may occur tomorrow. Even this phrasing seems to court anxiety, to bring to the surface the percolating fears of uncertain outcomes. Even so, I believe there is an antidote to this anxiety. There is a way of being present, here and now, that truly equips you to step into the unknown.
Hope.
It is a power greater than the fear of death. It is the luminous filament tied round your soul, irresistibly pulling you into the future. It wakes you up early on Christmas morning. It fills you with kinetic energy to get up and do things. It elevates mood. Combats fatigue. Causes you to forget anxiety. Keeps the toddler on his feet, even when she falls over and over again. It is the metamorphic power to transform fear into excitement, risk into opportunity, and death into life.
But hopes absence? Confusion. Distraction. Fear. Anxiety. Avoidance. Ignorance. Meaninglessness. Lethargy. Immobility. Depression. Darkness.
I’m sure you can relate to this; just the discovery of the problem feels like finding the solution. Realizing that I traded out hope for security way back in 2008 feels like a cloud break in the middle of a rainy day. Suddenly I’m thinking to myself “Wait, could I still do something meaningful with my life? Could I dare to take risks to pursue some higher calling, some larger purpose? Could I really live as if the future holds some wonderful promise?” Old dreams resurface. Childhood visions of meaning and joy persist just beyond the cloud breaks, despite years of calcifying cardiac diminishment. Delight comes easier while the slavery to pleasure diminishes. The thick dark forest which the road of life has brought me into has begun to show some breaks. I’m getting glimpses through the brambles, moss, and branches; expansive valleys and snowy peaks lie just beyond.
Quality risk taking is powered by hope. It is the belief that some good will precipitate from trying to do something new. The vision of what might be is so good, in fact, that it warrants the cost of failure. That is what hope is all about. It is about being in one position, having a vision of what it would be like in a new position, and believing that you can get to that position. If your faith in that vision is robust, even the exacting price of failure is considered worthwhile. A new consideration may crop up at this point, that not all hopes or visions that you hope in are, in fact, worthwhile. I can look back at my high school dreams of glory and point out some ways that vainglory was always going to be a loosing bet. Let it be. Even so, the compromise I made of saying that the price of failure is too high a price for any hope was certainly in error. There are many things worth failing for.
Hope. From the outside, its just something you don’t have. An abstract concept which, while understood as a word, contains not more than a puddle’s depth of meaning. Another “virtue”. But, when viewed from inside, it is a doorway into an enchanted land filled with excitement. From inside, the world becomes transfused with promise, a place where the best things imaginable could still happen. It is time to get our hopes up.