the casino

This is probably not a shock, but I think risk is too highly touted in today's society. It probably always has been. I know that I am probably not risky enough in my approach to life, so I am a bit biased. However, my observation is that voices of caution are almost always outnumbered by voices who advocate throwing caution to the wind. I think I know part of the reason.

Imagine for a moment that all of society exists within a huge casino. People can make money working at the casino doing various jobs at various salary scales. People can also gamble that money at the casino. One real difference between this fictional casino and a real casino is that in my fictional casino the house does not always win, but rather only sometimes wins. Many of the games are not rigged against the players. Another real difference is that playing many of the games in this casino would require a large time investment, and all of them would require a large financial commitment.

Some of the more conservative games would return a steady income and rarely bust, and some of the more risky games would frequently provide a high payout but would also frequently wipe out players' finances. Hard work and intelligence would make a difference in the games in the casino, but ultimately random chance would be the biggest factor.

Imagine for a moment who in this casino world would likely be the most financially successful. It would be the people who took big chances that paid off in a big way, or the lucky risk takers. Who in this world would experience the most financial ruin? It would be the people who took big chances that wiped them out, or the unlucky risk takers. Most who decided to rely mainly on salary and the more reliable casino games would do average or maybe slightly better than average, but few would come anywhere close to being among the most successful.

The people who others looked to for advice on how to be a success would not be the more financially conservative people, because few of them were extremely successful. The advice would come from the lucky risk takers. They would be interviewed as experts, they would write books, and they would host their own reality TV shows. In all of this press, they would extol the hard work it took to get to where they are and the importance of the risks that they took.

I think that is what is happening today. The people others look to for success are largely the people who have succeeded due to high risks they have taken. In a lot of cases, those risks were intelligent. In many they weren't. Either way, the risks are how people got where they are.

As an example, throughout the seasons that I have watched of the show The Apprentice, there have been a lot of people for whom there was no rational reason why they were successful. They weren't particularly smart, and they didn't have the business savvy that would be expected. A lot of them, though, were risk takers. I can't count the number of people I saw on the show who had made money in real estate. A couple of years ago an inebriated marmoset could have made a killing in real estate if he took enough risks. That monkey would probably have been wiped out in the last year-and-a-half, but would have had plenty of opportunity before then to share his wisdom of how he struck it rich so quickly.

Past performance is no guarantee of future success. Remember that before taking advice from a drunken monkey.