#risk tolerance

Read Time: ~ 10 Minutes

Our topic today begins with a little-known diplomat of the former Japanese Empire, stationed in Kaunas, Lithuania.

Born in Gifu, Chūbu, to middle-class parents, Chiune Sugihara (杉原 千畝) had an unconventional path in life. He was the second of five sons and one daughter, graduated from high school with top honours, but deliberately failed the entrance exam for medical school, defying his father’s wishes.

Instead, he enrolled at what is now Waseda University majoring in English. He passed the Foreign Ministry scholarship exam and was first stationed in Korea. Taking the exam again, he achieved distinction in Russian, which led to his posting in Manchuria, where he studied Russian and German. By the time he was appointed Vice Consul of the Japanese Consulate in Kaunas, Sugihara was fluent in seven languages: Japanese, English, Korean, Russian, German, Mandarin, and Lithuanian, an extraordinary repertoire for any diplomat.

1940 soon rolled around and the shadow of World War II loomed large. The Soviet Union had occupied Lithuania, a nation with a significant Jewish population alongside neighbouring Poland. Fearing persecution (an ominous foreshadowing of what the German Reich would bring), thousands sought exit visas to escape.

As wartime pressures mounted, foreign consulates in Kaunas were ordered to close one by one.

Yet Sugihara remained.

For weeks, he worked 18 to 20 hours a day, handwriting visas for Jewish refugees desperate to flee. He continued until the very last possible moment — as his train out of Lithuania was literally pulling away from the station.

In total, Sugihara issued thousands of visas, far exceeding his official quota and against explicit instructions from the Japanese Foreign Ministry. His actions saved countless lives, but came at a personal cost. Years later, he was dismissed from the ministry and imprisoned for his 'Lithuania Incident'.

It was not until 1991, 5 years after his death in Kanagawa that Japan’s then Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, Muneo Suzuki, formally apologised for Sugihara’s unfair treatment. The man had endured a life marked by dishonour, only to receive a simple “sorry” for his life’s greatest work.

Modern estimates suggest that the direct descendants of those saved by Sugihara now number over 100,000. And he was by no means the only hero in that dark chapter of human history. Banker Nicholas Winton organized the Kindertransport, forging documents that allowed hundreds of children to escape Nazi-controlled Germany. Père Marie-Benoît smuggled thousands of Jews across the French border. Physician Tina Strobos hid more than 100 Jews in her own home. Each stood fearlessly in the face of what was almost certain death.

So what does this have to do with risk taking?

At his new job, workers view that stuff as red tape put out by moralizing busybody managers, they know that sometimes accidents happen, it's a fact of life, and since safety directives are just busywork drafted by out of touch managers who don't really care if you follow the regs or not, the best thing is to just ignore them. After all, accidents are a fact of life, some people get into worse accidents than others, that's just how the world works.

In business there’s a concept known as “Risk Tolerance.” Risk tolerance is exactly what it sounds like, how much risk your willing to take on in a given investment. For businesses it usually refers to either monetary investment, new product lines, etc.

Everything in life has some risk involved. If you are trying to find an audience for your writing at some point you will have to take a chance. There is a trade off between the amount of risk you take and the potential reward that comes from it. In many cases the higher the risk the higher the possible reward, but since there are no sure things in life you have to make sure the risks that you take are in line with what you can afford to lose.

For someone who is a born writer, writing doesn’t sound like a risky endeavor. It seems about as risky as breathing. However, becoming a known writer, creating a business out of writing, does have it’s risks.

On the low end of the scale low risk/low reward, you can always write for yourself. It is completely possible for a writer to never spend more than a few dollars here and there on pens and paper there’s no monetary risk involved.  There’s also no readership for this kind of writing.

Another low scale risk/reward writing option is blogging. An example I’m positive your familiar with if your reading this is Tumblr itself. This site is a low risk/low reward writing platform. Some people do make a few dollars here and there using various means, advertising their books, taking commissions, etc. but for most of us, there is no monetary investment or risk of loss in this kind of site.

Building on risk you can have your own website. This is where you start getting into cost/benefit. A domain name/ web hosting will cost you some. For my website; www.TamaraHaddock.com I pay about $250 a year. $12 to keep the domain name active and 19.99 for the web hosting. It’s important to note at this point I’ve had the site about 2 years, and it gets almost no traffic, however I keep it up and running, I can afford the loss of $21 a month to own my domain name. Some people might choose not to take risk of losing that much.

When you start trying to market your work to a wider audience there is always a risk involved.

Advertisements can run you as much, or as little as your willing to spend on them, but there is no guarantee that the person who sees your ad will have any interest in buying your book or your writing.  

If you attempt to go the traditional publishing route of a book there is always the risk of rejection. Sometimes emotional risks or “dread” risks are harder to overcome than monetary risks. It’s not hard to throw five or ten dollars at putting up an ad for something yourself published, but when you put something out in the hands of someone capable of tearing it apart, it’s a little harder to take that chance. It feels like you personally are at the risk of rejection rather than your work.

Choosing who to work with on your writing is also a risk/reward endeavor. If you contact an editor/book reviewer/ agent/publisher you are taking the risk on that persons experience, skill, and connections. Sometimes the risk pays off and you get a good working relationship, other times unscrupulous people try to profit off of the dreams and ambitions of others.  I’ll give you an example of this one that drives me crazy. Online Writing Courses. There are writing courses out there that claim they make six figures a year and promise that they can help you do the same.  Consider this though, if you are hearing about a writer not through the popularity of their writing, but through the class they are selling via ads for a couple hundred bucks a piece are they actually making their income by writing? Or are they making it off their customers desire to make money off writing?

How much are you willing to risk getting where you want to go?

What risks are you willing to take, either personally to your ego, or monetarily to your bank account? Look at the potential reward that each risk offers, what are the odds that the reward will be worth more to you than what you risk losing? What if you lose everything you invest in the endeavor? Would it have been worth it? If the answer is no, then the risk is too high.

You have a patient come in with a stomach ache, nausea, feels tired and sort of generally miserable, no other obvious characteristic symptoms.

Out of 100 patients like this, 90* will be a minor gastroenteritis or whatever, maybe you ate something bad, here’s some nausea medication, go home and eat bland foods and get enough fluid and sleep it off.

And 7 will be appendicitis or gallstones or pancreatitis and need to be admitted to the hospital, 1 will be a heart attack with atypical symptoms, 1 will be the first sign of cancer, and 1 will be some weirdo disorder with a name like “Coleman’s 4268py deletion snydrome, Type II”** that you never heard of.

If I were a doctor, this would make me terrified to ever tell a patient “maybe you ate something bad, go home and sleep it off.”  Even though that’s usually the right answer, and even though it’s a waste of time and money to do an EKG and CT and 4268py test on everyone with a tummy ache--it’s got to be anxiety-provoking to not be certain that you aren’t missing something.  And at some point you will send someone home only to get a call the next day that they collapsed and now they’re in the ICU (or the morgue).  And it’s got to be really hard to go back to work after that and say “go home and sleep it off” to your next patient, even though that’s still usually the right answer.

I’m understanding more these days how tough it is to live with that kind of risk and responsibility.

*not actual statistics