Red lines or blurred lines: risk taking and decision making

To make a change is to take a risk. When we cannot predict the future, how it can be otherwise? All our choices and decisions have an element of risk, which we claim to feel encouraged to minimise or see ourselves as adverse to it. Despite this, we continue to produce evidence to the contrary. Every year, huge numbers of us change jobs, move house, emigrate, and start (or leave) families. For a species that doesn’t like change, we seem strangely addicted to it.

But our decisions still remain, to varying degrees, a punt. So how can we increase our chances of making the headlines rather than a guest appearance in The Sidebar of Shame? The first thing to accept is that we cannot control everything: life has more moving parts than a Swiss watch, and its engineering is considerably inferior. This doesn’t mean that we have to accept whatever may happen to us, but it does mean accepting that it might. And reminding ourselves that some accidents, at least, are happy ones. To misquote Peter Mandelson, we need to be intensely relaxed about people being incredibly lucky. Or at least luckier than we feel ourselves to be.

We can, however, deny ourselves the chance to be lucky. If we allow ourselves to become too attached to our Comfort Zone, we may eventually realise that there is a flipside to the cliché “nothing ventured, nothing gained”. Even if we don’t constantly compare ourselves with others, we do lose something if we venture nothing: opportunity. More specifically, the opportunity for improvement.