Episode 1174: Risk Versus Experiments

[00:00:00] Scott Maderer: Thanks for joining me on episode 1,174 of the inspired stewardship podcast.

[00:00:07] Marnie Swedberg: Hi, this is Marnie Swedberg and I'm here to challenge you to invest in yourself, invest in others, develop your influence and impact the world by using your time, talents and treasures to live out your God. Given goals, understanding biblical success principles is a great starting point.

[00:00:22] And for ongoing inspiration and encouragement. Listen to the inspired stewardship podcast with my friends, Scott Maderer.

[00:00:29] Scott Maderer: So what can I do to design the experiment in such a way that I get data that further reduces the risk? So you're using that risk level and the idea of getting data through an experiment to allow yourself to do things and try things, but always manage to just get information and survive. To try it again.

[00:00:55] Welcome. And thank you for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcast. [00:01:00] If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent and your treasures for your true caller in the inspired stewardship podcast, who will learn to invest in yourself, invest in others and develop your influence.

[00:01:17] So that. Can impact the world

[00:01:21] in today's episode about impacting the world through stewarding your talent. I talk with you about the difference between risk and running experiments. I talk about why having a mindset that allows you to filter fatal versus non-fatal risk is needed. And I also share why having a mindset of experiments helps you to move forward.

[00:01:41] You've heard me talk about developing your talent. And one of the best ways to do that is through books. But if you're like most people today, it's hard to find the time to read. And that's why today's podcast is brought to you by audible. Go to inspired stewardship.com/audible to sign [00:02:00] up and you can get a 30 day free trial.

[00:02:03] There's over 180,000 titles to choose from. And you can pick one and listen your way to developing your talents via. That's inspired stewardship.com/audible to get your free trial and listen to great books the same way you're listening to this podcast. I've talked before about how, one of the ways that I like to frame doing things when I'm.

[00:02:29] Trying something new in business or in my life as an experiment. And I've talked before about how that helps my mindset, because it allows me to look at something as a test, something that I'm trying out, something that I'm using just to gather information or data. But I wanted to talk a little bit about how this intersects with risk.

[00:02:51] One of the things that holds us back from doing things is our perception of the risk of [00:03:00] doing that. And by the way, that perception doesn't have to be reality. It's just how we see how risky the situation is. What is it that we're doing? And the truth is all of us have different levels of risk that we consider.

[00:03:15] Okay. for some of us doing something like a public speaking event is incredibly risky and feels scary and intimidating. And for other people that does not, for some people doing something like launching a new business and putting your entire life savings into it could feel. Way too risky. And for others, that's something that they could actually do and still sleep at night and not be overly worried about it.

[00:03:43] We have different levels of tolerance for what we see as risky or not. And I've used framing things as an experiment to help me deal with this perception of risk that I. And I will be honest. My risk tolerance is [00:04:00] relatively low in many areas of my life. I tend to be somebody who's very demanding. Who's a perfectionist who likes to get things right.

[00:04:08] But I'm also a pretty driven person who likes to get results. And so there's this tension inside my own mind from a disc point of view, I am a high C and a high D so I'm both that results driven personality and that perfectionist personality at war within myself, where I want to get things done.

[00:04:30] I want to get results. And that requires taking a certain level of risk, but I'm also somewhat risk averse and perfectionistic and want to get everything right. And doing something new or doing something challenging is not a good way of getting everything right. And so one of the other filters that I've learned to develop is the idea of thinking about risk on a continuum from fat.

[00:04:58] To non [00:05:00] fatal or vice versa from nonfatal to fatal, whichever way you wanna think about it. Now, fatal here does not necessarily mean literally fatal as in, if I do this thing, I might die, but it could be in terms of what, how much damage is it going to do the example I used earlier about taking out your entire life savings so that you can open a business.

[00:05:23] That's a pretty fatal risk in that. If it doesn't work, you now have no business and you have no life savings. And if you're, let's say 55 years old, that's gonna put you in a very negative position for the rest of your life. It's going to be very damaging to what comes next. On the other hand, doing something like that when you're much younger.

[00:05:50] And especially if it's a much lower amount of money might be a non-fatal risk. So it's not even just the activity. It's looking at the [00:06:00] activity in the context of your life and in the possibility of recovery from it doing a public speaking event. That's relatively non-fatal in most cases because the truth is.

[00:06:13] Most of the time, if you're doing a speaking event and you just really make a bad mistake and screw up well, yeah, you may never come back to that particular platform and you may even get some people talking about how bad of a job you did, but you probably can recover from that and you can get. Later events and you can get better at what you're doing and you can learn, you learn from it and use as an activity.

[00:06:36] So it's a relatively non-fatal risk, even though a lot of times we feel like it's so possibly damaging to our reputation, that this would be fatal to us. So it's this idea of really stepping back and objectively evaluating what are the chances of recovery? How bad would this be? If everything goes wrong.

[00:06:59] and [00:07:00] how much room do I have to recover from it? How damaging would it be? And I actually will sometimes give things a numerical scale where 10 is maximum damage and a one is pretty much no damage at all. And then try to give a new miracle. Obviously to some idea, this is a mindset. This is a, an opinion.

[00:07:28] You, you can talk to others. You can work with a coach or someone else and get an outsider to look at it and evaluate the situation as well. That can help give you some data points to look at. If that's something that makes you feel more comfortable, but to some extent, it's really just, what is your opinion?

[00:07:45] How much recovery can you have from this? And it is something where obviously you're gonna get it wrong sometimes. And this is where having that experimental mindset. can help because [00:08:00] again, in an experiment, if you get it right, or you get it wrong, either way, doesn't matter, because what you're gathering is data.

[00:08:07] And if you're making sure that most of the risk you take are closer to that, non-fatal end. And if it's going to be a fatal risk, is there a way you can test it at a smaller scale? Is there a way. You could split off a portion of it and find out how it would work without going all in and making it a truly fatal event, because that's what you would do in an experimental situation.

[00:08:37] If you only have enough of something to test something one time. You're not gonna use it all up in your initial test, or at least you hope that you won't and you wouldn't have to. So what can I do to design the experiment in such a way that I get data that further reduces the risk? So you're using that risk level.

[00:08:59] [00:09:00] And the idea of getting data through an experiment to allow yourself to do things and try things, but always manage to just get information and survive. To try it again, by doing this and looking at this kind of matrix, you can make much more progress. Thanks for listening.

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