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ARE WE TOO RISK-CONSCIOUS THESE DAYS?

Social Issues

 

                  

Life is extremely short. We all have our epic dreams and to make our dreams a reality, we take massive risks along the road of precarious uncertainty. Amateur entrepreneurs risk their financial belongings to kick-start a new business; university freshmen major in courses, unsure of whether their efforts will yield a substantial income in the future; young-bloods or teens chose to waste precious time in dating and sightseeing rather than on books nowadays. Whatever we tend to do, there is a certain level of risk involved, let it be financial, social or academic. Now, as the world population is soaring upwards, the number of examples of failures is sky-rocketing simultaneously as well and so does our fear of taking risks in life. As animals adapt to acclimatize to a risk-bearing environment, similarly we have gradually learned to be risk-conscious in this dynamic and shape-shifting environment of what is more commonly known as ‘life’.

 

My dad came from a farming family. He built a business from scraps. By liquidating and investing all his financial holdings, he not only risked our future but the future of dozens of other shareholders who decided to embark on a new business venture. Now, after ten years of enterprise, he can breathe a sigh of relief and say, “Rest assured. The future of this company is well secured.” On the contrary, there are ten other uncles of mine who were not as successful as my dad but they ended up taking up the same risk-building a real-estate company!

 

Besides, you cannot expect someone to be risk-conscious unless he or she is brought up in a needy family. Naturally, I don’t expect the sons and daughters of multi-millionaire Sheikhs and Mollahs, living in luxurious palaces of Saudi Arabia or Dubai to be so nonchalantly courageous. Life teaches valuable lessons to those who understands and feels poverty, cruelty and oppression and it is needless to say that the most valuable lesson of life is knowing how and why to take risks.

 

Failure is a common phenomenon in modern life. Man is prone to fail more often than he is likely to gain success. It is this fear of failure which makes humans so wary before taking up a new challenge. An unsuccessful wanderer will probably grow to be more careful than a person who is used to tasting victory throughout his entire life. He will definitely feel that life gets deceptively tricky once you start to lose. Undoubtedly, losing is so painful that one is easily daunted by any upcoming life-changing event ahead. Giving up or procrastination will not hurt his chances however. Therefore, losing teaches us to be risk-conscious and it is proved yet again that we were not inherently a vigilant species.

 

Thanks to technology and science, more and more doors of opportunity have opened before us. As a result, we, humans, are faced with an increasingly awful number of choices. With greater choice comes greater opportunity cost-at least that’s how modern-day economists will interpret ‘choice’. Honestly, I am now a high-school graduate and I don’t have the slightest clue in which engineering field I should chose to major. There is aeronautics; then there is electrical, not to mention computer science and engineering which is fraught with nerdy geeks who have spent half their lifetimes toying with PCs and joysticks. Sadly, it appears as if making a decision is unimaginably tougher than I originally expected it to be. Knowing that there is no turning back, it’s an incredibly daunting experience. Call me risk-conscious if you like to be definitive but I can’t just afford not to be!

 

Life is complicated enough to force us to think twice, even thrice before conclusively arriving at a particular decision. Why it is that life makes us think so often? Well, obvious, isn’t it? Life rarely grants second chances and, reasonably enough, all the more reason for you to ponder over the risky implications. Banks won’t let you borrow money before evaluating you and the risks you carry. So, we see that risk is measured nowadays and assigned a certain monetary value in the form of interest rates. The local municipality won’t let my newly purchased car on the streets without it getting insured. Insurance isn’t bought on the presumption that part of the repairment cost will be covered if it gets wrecked. Rather, it is based on the assumption that your car is likely to crash for the time it is being used on the streets. Interestingly, neither the borrowed money nor the car is the cause for concern here. It is the individual user against whom all the risks are secured on a pre-emptive measure. Surprisingly, it doesn’t end there. Consider business organizations again. Apparently, there is an allowance for every calculated risk which ultimately goes down into the accounting ledgers of all corporations. Talk about provision for bad debts, retained profits and general reserves and you see that these are forged following the same ideal concept and primarily as a result of risk-consciousness.

 

We have talked about employers and corporations all along. Now, let us look at employees. Employed people are constantly at risks as employers can never guarantee gradual promotions or a steady rise of incomes, let alone a hundred percent job security. In fact, the jobs that earn us money are tied to thousands of other complementary factors – the nation’s economy, annual GDP, taxation, inflation and so forth. There is a non-zero possibility that you can be unemployed the very next day unless you work in your dad’s company. Even if you move from one job to another in the hope of making a better fortune, you are still making quite a leap of faith, assuming that local rent, housing costs, travel woes, your child’s education will come into play as concerning factors. So, apparently, it appears that the people at the bottom are at more risks than the people at the top. Is it not so? Well, one can then easily understand that these risk-adapted people should have been at the top. Guess what? It doesn’t work that way. The reason that very few people own the big corporations and engineer the world’s economy today is that they took the appropriate risks for the appropriate job. Consequently, we can conclude that almost everybody is risk-conscious but only a handful among them is aware or conscious of the risks they must take in order to possess what they want to possess and control what they dream of controlling. In fact, taking humongous risks may earn you the awesome title of a daredevil but it never will make your efforts count unless, of course, you want to be an adventurous daredevil yourself like the one-and-only ‘Johnny Blaze’. Unfortunately though, you must be able to buy the prayers of the billions before even thinking of attempting such a deathly stunt.

 

With respect to the average Joe public, including myself, we are very much conscious of the costs and yields of our decisions. But, before arriving to any definitive conclusion, I guess it’s worth guessing why there is only one Bill Gates in the entire world. He also took a massive risk before starting his own company and it is no wonder that he is much more successful than my dad (oh well, he isn’t famous). And I am pretty confident that many people tried or are trying or will be trying to copycat a Bill Gates. Honestly and probably discouragingly speaking, imitating will get you nowhere. Come on. If a company is found copying another genuine product, then it is sued with copyright infringement. Unfortunately, the same principle applies to humans although there aren’t any laws for that aspect. The best thing you can do is to learn from them and apply accordingly. Not everybody can be a perfect engineer of their life and hence we will continue to see these rare examples only once or twice in each of our lifetime! May God help me to survive that long to witness another such magnificent character. 

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