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The key ingredient is the courage to try, not the safety net. Countries lauded for their strong safety nets are not overflowing with people taking ambitious ris
by jandrewrogers 11mo ago
The key ingredient is the courage to try, not the safety net. Countries lauded for their strong safety nets are not overflowing with people taking ambitious risks. Often quite the opposite; the strong safety net reflects a cultural aversion to risk.
People with the courage to try don’t need a safety net to do it. In practice they seem to be almost inversely correlated.
An important aspect not mentioned is feeling like you will be adequately rewarded if your calculated risks pay off. This seems to be more pertinent than safety nets in practice.
- raw_anon_1111 11mo agoLook at the founders of the top 100 most valuable companies in the US. How many of them came from poverty?
- musebox35 11mo agoThat is insightful. Courage to take risks means higher standard deviation in outcomes, more visible successes, but also more hard failures. Risk averse cultures have more stable outcomes, no big successes, but also less financially crippling failures. A personal or social safety net may or may not make you risk averse. Taking semi-calculated risks seems like a skill that needs to be learned for successful entrepreneurship.
- GuB-42 11mo agoSurvivorship bias. On a personal level, if you take risks, there is a good chance for you to just fail and be forgotten to history. You can make it big, but is it worth the risk? On a country level, it is different. With millions of people trying, some of them will succeed. To produce high achievers, a country doesn't need to provide people with a safety net, it only needs to produce a lot of people.