As Indians, all we've ever been told has been for the goal of minimizing risk. A stable government job or a bank job used to be the fantasies that were spoken in soft murmurs at the dinner table. This then turned into parents boasting about their children getting a job at TCS and Infosys and other Indian companies that would promise more of the same - stability in the face of uncertainty.

Until, we go to see the most financially successful humans and they are all stories of taking on a high level of risk and it paying off. If you want to go a place to enjoy some positive competitive spirit, it would involve taking on some level of risk. The last battle arena in a civilized society is still one that is riddled with bodies. 

 

Chaos - the one true enemy

Our first few glimpses of adult life come in the way of our jobs. And the inner working inside companies. Behemoths that once took on an inordinate risk (for it's time) building a war chest of strategies, plans and fallbacks in order to stay on top. And the top jobs of executives in the company? De-risking.

For the one true enemy of the established company and the only friend of tiny startup - is chaos. Once you have a million users managing chaos is of the utmost importance. You need to ship features, but you also need to make sure you don't cause ripples in your user base. Changing a button from blue to red now needs to go through control groups and A/B testing to make sure that people react positively. 

While a new TikTok can bring short form video and grow quickly, for Facebook to bring reels to a billion users is much more difficult. Each top level meeting becomes about how we can maximize profits while not courting too much chaos. Because chaos is the one great leveler of companies. The true beast that no one wants to wake up. Because no amount of monopolies or diversification can save you when true chaos hits. And it can hit like a meteor wiping out the dinosaurs

 

The Unending Human Spirit

Yet chaos is not the only one in this battle. On the other side of the arena lives the human spirit. A spirit that can mobilize giant swaths of people to fight battles that cannot be won, and win them anyway. And the human spirit is the unstoppable force that is needed to survive against the chaos of nature. 

In a chaotic world it is important to both take risks and heed caution. Your village might be safe for now, but it is imperative that you take a walk to the mountains in search for better shelter in case of a flood. And so we explore. And we build. And we search. And we dream. Because it is essential for our survival and is embedded deep within our spirit

It can seem grim when we look at nature, and see the way that fighting and death is embedded in everything around us. Where predators and prey live in the same environment and the day the deer survives is the day the lion starves. Yet it is not our place to judge the world around is, because we are not the masters of the world.

 

Adulting is risk management

 As we grew up our parents were our risk managers. They kept us under their roofs, fed us, clothed us and gave us the tools so we could slowly learn to manage the risk on our own. And we were slowly introduced to the chaos of the world. For when you are a child you only need to pay much attention to the seasons when it helps you keep track of the holidays in school

Yet as you grow older, you take on responsibilities. Which means you take more risk. You rent a house, because living on the streets is risky. You take a job, because not affording to pay rent is risky. You pay for a washing machine, because wearing dirty clothes to your job is risky.

And as you grow older, the amount of risk you can take also increases. You start to take and hedge bets on the world around you. You take a bet on whether AI will have us look for other avenues of work. Or whether you should buy a house in the middle of an inflated economy. Whether you should have kids when you might not have a job six months from now.

And this is the phase that I find myself in currently. There are a near infinite set of moves I can make, yet I know that I cannot make these moves from the comfort of my childhood home. I cannot seek to understand the world if I don't make the effort to out into the world

For I am but a tiny human wielding the unending human spirit in the face of utter chaos. No pressure