The Risk of Doing Nothing

I used to believe I could never achieve anything significant without taking a risk.

When I look back at the biggest decisions I have made, that seemed true. I moved across the country as a teenager, changed careers several times, and started new businesses in different industries. In all of those situations, I committed to a direction without knowing exactly how it would work out.

In a previous journal I wrote about using intelligence to mitigate risk. Sometimes we keep ourselves in situations where success feels more likely because we want to avoid failure. Other times circumstances force us to make a decision before we can know the outcome.

One of the clearest examples came in 2008, when I was in business school and running a real estate business as the market was collapsing. I enrolled early that year because I was ready for a new chapter, and I planned to pay for school through the business.

I thought I had more time, but the financial crisis accelerated much faster than I expected. Almost overnight, the income I planned to use for tuition disappeared. By the end of the year, I closed my office and needed to find a new job. Staying in school meant taking out a big loan. Around the same time, I had finally saved enough money for an engagement ring.

I had to decide how I wanted to use the limited resources I had. I could preserve the money and buy myself more time, or I could stay committed to school and the life I wanted to build with my partner. Plenty of people advised me to pause both. I believed that if I waited, it could take years before I had enough money to make those commitments again.

I stayed in school, took out the loans, and bought the ring.

At the time, I was focused less on whether those decisions were risky and more on where I wanted my life to go. The debt from school felt like an investment in the next chapter of my career, while the engagement ring represented a commitment to the life I wanted outside of work.

Looking back, I understand those moments differently. They were high-stakes decisions made under uncertainty. I could see what I was putting at stake, even though I could not predict what would happen next. The important question was whether I could live with the consequences if things went poorly.

To answer that question, I did a worst-case scenario exercise. I wrote out a detailed version of how everything in my life could fall apart. I imagined losing my job, losing my future wife, going completely broke, and becoming homeless. I followed each fear as far as I could until I reached the outcome I was most afraid of.

As I wrote everything down, I realized how little I believed in the extreme scenarios I had created. I could lose money and struggle to find work, but I had friends and family who would give me a place to stay or help me financially. I had a partner who would ride or die with me. My real worst case was having to swallow my pride and ask people I loved for help.

That realization gave me clarity. I could separate an uncertain future from an outcome that would actually destroy me. I knew the loans would put me in debt and I knew exactly what the engagement ring would cost, but I also understood that I had the ability and support to recover if things became difficult. I stayed focused on building the future I wanted.

Years later, I find myself thinking about a different problem. I already trust my ability to make consequential decisions when the stakes are high, yet I sometimes give much smaller actions a similar amount of weight. Promoting my work or pursuing opportunities that require introductions can feel very vulnerable because I’m afraid to set myself up for rejection. I’ve also pitched on projects that I was very hopeful for, only to lose out, and I let that disappointment affect my willingness to pursue completely unrelated opportunities.

Why do these challenges feel bigger than they really are? It could be what behavioral economists call “status quo bias” which describes our tendency to choose the safety of what we already know even when other options are available. Another concept called “loss aversion” describes how people tend to react more intensely to losing something than to gaining something of comparable value. I can see how both tendencies show up in my own thinking. I give more weight to what could go wrong, which can make doing nothing feel safer than pursuing an uncertain outcome.

I have to remind myself that reaching out to a potential client or asking someone for an introduction can create discomfort, but the consequences are minor. If someone says no or never responds, I am essentially where I started. 

This is where my understanding of risk has started to change. I used to associate meaningful progress with the big decisions that shaped my life. Now I can see that those decisions often depended on much smaller actions that came before them. I had to set things in motion and make a series of decisions before I ever reached the moment that felt consequential.

I’m paying more attention to this process. A small action may lead nowhere, or it may become the beginning of something I could never have planned for. I can live with either outcome, but I cannot live with sitting still.

I might protect myself from an uncomfortable outcome by doing nothing, but I also give up whatever may come from taking action. I want to judge an opportunity by the full range of what could happen, including what I stand to gain and what I may miss by letting it pass.