Risk-Taking, Creativity, and the Experimenter's Mindset
Risk-Taking, Creativity, and the Experimenter's Mindset
We’ve all become more familiar with (and hopefully adept at) calculating risk over the past two years as we’ve struggled to balance the demands of daily life with the threats posed by the seemingly endless waves of the COVID-19 virus. We’ve always lived with risks, but the pandemic has significantly altered the risk/reward ratio of everyday life. It’s also made many of us more risk averse. Even if your tolerance for risk-taking hasn’t changed, chances are you’re more mindful of the risks of daily life than you once were. The continuous need to reassess the risk/reward ratio of stepping out into the world beyond our front door has affected our mental, physical, and emotional health.
Risk-taking is not binary, meaning you're a risk-taker or you’re not. Our willingness and ability to tolerate risk depends on the type of risk we’re facing. Tina Seelig, faculty director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, and her colleagues identified six primary types of risks:
Physical
Emotional
Social
Financial
Intellectual
Political
Your unique risk profile (how you respond to each of the six types of risk) affects how you invest your money, what you eat, how much you exercise, your romantic life, your creative life, and much, much more. (Below you’ll find a link to the Understanding Your Risk Profile workbook I’ve developed to help you learn more about your unique risk profile.)
As we’ve grappled with extra levels of risk to our health and well-being, some of us have become more conservative—our risk to reward ratio has changed in response to the threats posed by the virus. Many of the pleasures we once enjoyed (such as dining in restaurants, going to bars and clubs, and leisure travel) no longer seem like they’re worth the risk involved. But our heightened sensitivity to and increased avoidance of risk comes with a cost: some of the joy of life has drained away… Sadly, many have slid into depression. A recent study on the global impact of the pandemic on mental health, published in the medical journal The Lancet, found that major anxiety and depressive disorders worldwide have increased 25.6% and 27.6% on average since the start of the pandemic, and as much as 38.7% in some countries.
Our COVID-induced diminished tolerance for risk-taking may also have another significant consequence: you may be feeling an unfamiliar sense of alienation from your creative confidence and desire to engage in new creative work. You’re not alone, and you can rebuild your confidence and rekindle your passion for creative work, if you’re willing to take a few small risks.
Why We Take Risks
Risk-taking is scary, so why do it? In his book Choose Possibility, Sukhinder Singh Cassidy identifies four key reasons we take risks:
To discover new opportunities
To learn something new
To achieve a new goal
To avoid further harm
Sometimes there’s a single reason driving you to take a risk, but more often, there’s more than one reason. We believe that if we’re successful, a door will open, and another door after that, and another after that… When we take risks, we are leaning forward into the future we hope to create.
The story that you tell yourself about the risk you’re taking and the future you’re leaning into is important because that story is also the safety-net that softens the impact of mistakes and failures. If you’re a committed artist, inventor, or innovator in your story, then your failures are proof that you are doing the work you set out to do, because risk-taking is an essential part of the creative process. Not the wild, often unhealthy behavior of the Romantic, angst-ridden artist in an absinthe-induced daze, but the persistent willingness to share exploratory ideas, ask questions, attempt and do new things—what behavior scientists call “intellectual” risk-taking. These calculated risks are the sparks that ignite your creativity.
I want to return to the COVID-19 virus because there’s another aspect of the pandemic that’s relevant to how we think about creativity, invention, and innovation. In the recent New York Times Magazine article “Halting Progress and Happy Accidents: How mRNA Vaccines Were Made,” Gina Kolata and Benjamin Mueller tell the story behind the development of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, widely considered one of the “most impressive feats of medical science in the modern era.” Developed at record speed, the vaccines are actually the culmination of scientific research and development in three separate areas that on their own were considered failures. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction to their fascinating article:
The vaccines were possible only because of efforts in three areas. The first began more than 60 years ago with the discovery of mRNA, the genetic molecule that helps cells make proteins. A few decades later, two scientists in Pennsylvania decided to pursue what seemed like a pipe dream: using the molecule to command cells to make tiny pieces of viruses that would strengthen the immune system.
The second effort took place in the private sector, as biotechnology companies in Canada in the budding field of gene therapy—the modification or repair of genes to treat diseases—searched for a way to protect fragile genetic molecules so they could be safely delivered to human cells.
The third crucial line of inquiry began in the 1990s, when the U.S. government embarked on a multibillion-dollar quest to find a vaccine to prevent AIDS. That effort funded a group of scientists who tried to target the all-important “spikes” on H.I.V. viruses that allow them to invade cells. The work has not resulted in a successful H.I.V. vaccine. But some of these researchers … veered from the mission and eventually unlocked secrets that allowed the spikes on coronaviruses to be mapped instead.
In early 2020, these different strands of research came together. The spike of the Covid virus was encoded in mRNA molecules. Those molecules were wrapped in a protective layer of fat and poured into small glass vials. When the shots went in arms less than a year later, recipients’ cells responded by producing proteins that resembled the spikes—and that trained the body to attack the coronavirus.
The extraordinary tale proved the promise of basic scientific research: that once in a great while, old discoveries can be plucked from obscurity to make history.
At the end of their article, Kolata and Mueller write that the successful creation of the mRNA vaccine was:
… the culmination of decades of fundamental discoveries that had once been shrugged off as uninteresting. To get here, hundreds of researchers had tried, failed, reversed course and made incremental progress in different fields, never knowing for sure that any of their efforts would ever pay off.
But they did… Even when we fail, when we act, we learn, and we grow. The enemy of creativity isn’t failure, it’s indecision. Failing may scare us, but it’s also a conditioning exercise that builds resilience—and sometimes, unexpected, stunning success.
The Experimenter's Mindset and Small Risks
Risk, opportunity, and failure overlap with one another. Risks create opportunities, but they may also lead to failure—and failing scares us.
Fear kills imagination. And fear is always with us. Pretending it doesn't exist might work in a pinch, but eventually it returns. Learning to name, face, grapple with our fears: this is the start of the art of everything.
—Eric Liu, Imagination First
There’s another aspect of risk that also scares us: uncertainty. When we take a risk, we open ourselves up to living with uncertainty—a condition we typically avoid. But the creative process requires us to embrace uncertainty. In his book Uncertainty, entrepreneur and author Jonathan Fields, writes:
One of the single greatest determinants of high-level success as an innovator or creator in any realm is the ability to manage and at times even seek out sustained high levels of uncertainty, bundled lovingly with risk of loss and exposure to criticism.
Big risks inevitably conjure high levels of fear, driven in part by prolonged periods of heightened levels of uncertainty. But monumental risks aren’t the only type of risk—and they aren’t necessarily the most productive path to success either. When you examine the careers of highly successful artists, inventors, and entrepreneurs, they all have one thing in common: successful risk-takers spread their risk around. They make lots of small bets that they can learn from and build on.
Small bets are the foundation of the “experimenter’s mindset,” a playful approach to risk-taking driven by curiosity, constant experimentation, and a dedication to continuous incremental learning. Not all experiments are successful, but even those that aren’t provide essential information, as Tina Seelig notes:
… failed experiments are incredibly valuable in that they help close off paths that aren’t viable. Of course, nobody wants to fail, nor should they. But failure is an inevitable part of the creative process when you are doing things that haven’t been done before. As Henry Ford is claimed to have said, “Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.”
—Tina Seelig, InGenius
There’s one other aspect of risk-taking that’s important to note and that’s our natural aversion to loss. The fear we experience when we contemplate potential losses outweighs the value we perceive in equivalent potential gains. Loss aversion is a powerful force that can cloud our judgement, especially when it comes to financial risks. One way investors minimize the impact of loss aversion is strategic asset allocation: instead of making big investments in a few individual stocks or types of investments, they make smaller investments in a wide variety of investment types. In other words, they make lots of small bets.
We live in a time of great uncertainty, and that’s not likely to change soon… It’s difficult to embrace uncertainty, the risk of loss, and exposure to criticism, but understanding your tolerance for risk and how you react to different types of risks will help you see the potential opportunities that lie just beyond the limits of your instinctive responses. Adopting the experimenter’s mindset will help you take the type of risks and size of risks you can manage and learn from.
There’s a beautiful passage at the end of The Rise, Sara Lewis’ insightful book on creativity, the gift of failure, and the search for mastery that I want to share with you in closing:
The moment we designate the used or maligned as a state with generative capacity, our reality expands. President John F. Kennedy once mentioned an old saying that success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. Failure is an orphan until we give it a narrative. Then it is palatable because it comes in the context of story, as stars within a beloved constellation.
Once we reach a certain height we see how a rise often starts on a seemingly outworn foundation. The gift of failure is a riddle. Like the number zero, it will always be both the void and the start of infinite possibility. The arc is one for which there are few perfect words. Its most succinct summary may come from the wisdom in seventeenth-century poet and samurai Mizuta Masahide’s haiku: “My barn having burned down / I can now see the moon.”
Understanding Your Risk Profile
How has the pandemic changed your risk profile? What activities did you enjoy before the pandemic that now seem too risky? How are you coping with the loss of those activities? Has the pandemic affected how you think about and/or engage in your creative work?
Download my free six-page Understanding Your Risk Profile workbook to learn more about your unique risk profile and how you react to the types of risks that you’re most uncomfortable with.
If you’ve completed your annual review and goals for 2022, return to them after you’ve finished the risk profile exercise. Review your story and goals through the lens of your risk profile. Are there high risk goals in areas where you have a low tolerance for risk? If so, can you reframe those goals as a series of lower risk goals?
If you haven’t spent any time thinking about last year’s successes and your goals for 2022, consider downloading More About You, the free annual review and goal setting workbook I developed with Glen Lubbert of Stamina Labs. Give the annual review process a try!
The Understanding Your Risk Profile workbook is also a great warm-up for the upcoming cohort of the SecondBrain SuperPowers course I’ll be teaching in February. Join the course mailing list or reach out to me if you’d like to learn more about the course.