Calculating Your Risks

“Often the difference between a successful man and a failure is not one’s better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on his ideas, to take a calculated risk — and to act.”
 — Maxwell Maltz

Realize that whatever you choose to focus on affects your quality of life, or what Zig Ziglar calls your “standard of life,” and not just your standard of living. For instance, if you focus on the future by setting goals, you may be forcing yourself to remain in your comfort-zone and probably without ever knowing how far you can really go.

Jim Rohn said, “To know how far we can go is to risk going too far.” To reach your potential therefore, you will unquestionably need to confront risks. They are inevitable. They are unavoidable. You simply have to take them if you want your successfulness to manifest, and there’s no way of tiptoeing around it.

However, instead of asking yourself “how do I eliminate risk?” ask, “why do I avoid risk?” If you’re like most people, you’re avoiding risk because of fear and especially the fear of the unknown. Fear is a powerfully persuasive force that can not only put your goals on the backburner but one that can also put your life on the backburner as well.

In fact, your goals may be unconsciously reinforcing your fears.

A goal is not something separate from you or outside of you. It is something that is within you, something that should be made a part of your life right now. You see, the more passionlessly separated you are from the goals you set, the more unknown the unknown becomes and the more fear will build on itself.

Unknowingness creates unwillingness. As a Spanish proverb goes, “I fear not the man who tried and failed but the man who failed to try.” You can not eliminate risk but you can certainly eliminate the fear with which it is associated. Granted, the elimination of fear is not an instant process. But you can certainly reduce it by calculating your risks.

People who take calculated risks are people who turn chance into choice. If you take a risk you will be taking a chance, but if you take a calculated risk you will be making a choice. You don’t need to plot every single detail of your life in order to do this. All you need to know is what’s important to you rather than where you’re going.

This knowingness doesn’t have to be in the form of some great goal backed by an elaborate action plan with to-do lists and so on. It is to simply be consciously purposeful. It’s like a map with checkpoints that tell you where you are along your journey. Each checkpoint tells you exactly how close you are to your goal instead of how far you are from reaching it.

Moreover, rather than being unconscious of a problem until it’s too late, it is much better to know when you have one and that you can deal with it right away. If you’re too busy or focus strictly on your goals, it might pass you by unsuspectingly and blow up in your face at some later point in time. Therefore, think of your conscious purpose as your map where you can chart the course you want your life to follow.

Another way to look at working on a conscious purpose is like eating a big meal. You can’t eat it all in just one bite but you can certainly cut it down into bite-size chunks that are easier to swallow and digest. In the same way, by converting your values into a system of gradual steps, you will bring those things you truly want into everyday consciousness.

By calculating your risks, so to speak, you are making the unachievable achievable. Ultimately, by removing much of the unknown you will automatically remove — or in the very least, reduce — the fear of it.

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