What’s the Worst That Can Happen?

 

“C’mon! I ran the numbers and it will totally work out!”

This was my response to Rosanna’s cautious critique of my BIG IDEA. I, the eternal optimist, and Rosanna, the down-to-earth realist, often don’t see situations the same way. 

“We can’t take risks like that. We’re having our third child in a few months! We could lose everything!”

“This isn’t a risk…don’t worry. I worked it out. What’s really the worst that can happen, anyway?”

My feeble attempts to get Rosanna on board with my idea were not getting anywhere…at least not at first. Even though we don’t always see eye-to-eye on issues, our different perspectives and approaches do lead to good conversations between us. And in this particular case, I was able to get Rosanna on board, eventually, with a little convincing and honest consideration of “the worst that could happen.” 

Rethinking “The Worst”

When you are considering your next BIG IDEA, taking a chance, or trying something new, it’s helpful to genuinely ask yourself: “What’s the worst that can happen?” 

Imagine the worst reasonable scenario of everything going wrong. How bad would it really be? How intolerable would life really become if things didn’t work out? 

What’s important to recognize is that even if our big plans don’t work out, things really don’t get as bad as we think. And even if they do, our most dire circumstances can often be worse in our minds than they are in reality. (In fact, some thinkers actually suggest that we accustom ourselves to poor conditions so that if and when they actually arise, we’re unfazed. Pretty bold.) 

Risk and Your Brain

What often holds us back from taking the leap into our next thing is that we are naturally risk averse. This means that the potential losses we may suffer from things not working out outweigh the potential gains we might earn. Basically, we like to know what we’re getting, and we prefer stability and predictability over the unknown outcome. The funny thing is that even if we’re not thrilled with our current circumstances, we tend to accept them because at least know we know what we’ve got. We hate losing the known and leaping into the unknown. 

This is especially evident when a new opportunity arises. When the new (and potentially-but-not-guaranteed better) chances comes up and we weigh them against our current not-so-bad circumstances, we tend to stick with what we’ve got rather than go for more. Why? Because the risk of losing something scares us. 

• We might lose money. 
• We might waste time.
• We might hurt a relationship.
• We might be less happy.
• We might be embarrassed. 
• We might…we might…we might…

But what if we took a realistic look at what we could actually lose and asked ourselves, “What’s the worst that can happen? And is ‘the worst’ really so bad that we should avoid it entirely?” 

Being risk averse means that we tend to avoid putting something on the line for the chance to gain more. I don’t see risk aversion as a problem so much as I see it as an opportunity. It’s a built-in warning mechanism that says, “Stick with what you have today and don’t gamble it away for the mere chance of getting more!” This is a fair warning that we should heed…but we should NOT let it stop us. 

The most successful people don’t walk away when there’s a risk. Instead, they learn to manage risk. And one way to deal with risk (of the many ways we’ll end up discussing on this blog) is to imagine the worst-case scenario and realize: “Oh, it ain’t that bad after all!”

We’ve Tried This a Few Times

There have been plenty of times we have let risk aversion take control and we’ve walked away from opportunities. There have also been many points in our life together Rosanna and I have applied this worst-case scenario thinking and taken a next step. 

So back to my BIG IDEA (well, big for us, anyway). Back in 2014, I told Rosanna, “I think we can buy an investment house that we can rent out.” Initially our risk aversion instincts kicked in:

• With what money? 
• What do we know about real estate? 
• You know how hard it is to find a good tenant? 
• Does this mean we can’t go on vacation this year? 
• Why don’t we focus on our own home?  
• If this goes bad can we go bankrupt?

Okay, so honestly these objections came mostly from Rosanna. She insisted, “We won’t spend money to update this house but you want to buy another one?” I tried to respond to her perspectives – you’d have to ask her how loving (or not) our discussion ended up being. But the biggest question that she laid out there – and rightly so – was, “If this doesn’t work out, where does that leave us? How much do we really stand to lose and is it fair to our family to take this risk?” 

Yup, we lived in the what-ifs and did what we could to fight against leaving the safety of our comfort zone. I was sincerely challenged and doubted the plausibility of my plan. 

But then, together, we thought things through. “Okay, so lets say we buy it, and it gets trashed and we are paying double mortgages until we run out of money and the bank seizes the property and our own home and everything else…then we’d still have our jobs and probably live with one of our sets of parents for a few months until we figure out how to get back on our feet.”

Then it hit us. That’s it? Yes, this worst-case scenario – that was unlikely to totally even get that far – was not that bad after all. Then we got weird and even looked at it positively. “It could help us grow closer to our parents if we live with them for a few months…we would definitely learn what not to do in real estate…it would make us more thankful for our day jobs…”

It turned out that the risk really was worth taking, once we realized that if we were thoughtful then we could probably avoid most of the pitfalls. And hey, if the shit hit the fan then the outcome was one we could still totally live with. 

So we went for it and six years later we are glad we did. Things actually worked out pretty well and even the bad days never got anywhere near the worst-case scenario. The fear was in our minds; the joy is in the reality.

The Really Real Worst Thing…

But the more I think about fear and risk aversion, there’s one thought that lurks in the back of my mind. I honestly don’t think our biggest fear is that things will fall apart and we’ll be failures. I think our biggest fear is that we actually become successful.

We fear, obsess over, and sometimes even expect failure. But being successful is much scarier. Success implies responsibility, knowledge, commitment, and accountability. Success means something, and there may be a piece of us that secretly sabotages ourselves from genuinely stepping towards what we dream of from fear of actually achieving it. 

I’ve always been inspired by this quote from author Marianne Williamson: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world.”

So now as Rosanna and I set out on this new website and podcast endeavor together, relentlessly pursuing an amazing story and sharing it with others, we had to ask ourselves, “What’s the worst that can happen?” 

At first we listed a few what-ifs: No one would listen to us. It might waste our time. It might hurt our relationship. People might disagree or turn against us (or throw tomatoes at us in the street, I told Rosanna).

Then I shared with her my most honest and surprising answer: “That we make a difference.” That’s a lot of responsibility knowing that people may care about what we say and how we live, and that we may in turn influence how others live. 

But hey, when we really think about it, making a difference sounds pretty damn good after all.