Social Risk

We constantly make social risks to gain what we’ve purposed.

We tend to make calculated decisions and assessment about what we create by how it applies to others:

  • Whether we want something
  • Whether we’d want it if they wanted it
  • How likely they may want it
  • How much we’re willing to sacrifice, in light of all the above

We end up either trusting that we’ll yield meaningful results or we don’t bother starting it.

Unfortunately, people often don’t have the same values or purposes as us. This can be the source of many conflicts and can discourage us from future endeavors.

Every time we create things that may affect others, we risk our expectations of their opinion about it to be incorrect. Even when the risk is low, it’s never precisely certain what other people are thinking. It becomes more uncertain as it applies to how they see us, which becomes our reputation over time.

Since we don’t have the time to do everything we’d like to do, we prioritize what we want, with our decisions calculating between what we like and the chances other people will like it.

Deviants

Most people simply choose what they think other people would like, even when they hate it, because it gains the most power for other, more meaningful purposes.

Some people, though, consider their situation closely. They start asking what they’d like to do instead of merely what they think other people would like. As a general rule, they find every possible way to play and have fun, even at very serious or boring tasks.

These people will then make sacrifices toward finding an interest that fulfills multiple criteria at once:

  1. They like it enough that they can obsess about it for at least a few years.
  2. Other people like it but it’s not fulfilled by existing solutions.
  3. Other people are willing to give power to them for it, especially in the form of money.

Idea

To meet all these criteria at once usually requires focused creativity. People meet most of their typical, common desires through large groups that can do things more efficiently, so that creative solution usually has several constraints:

  1. It needs a small group, even if it’s simply a nucleus group in the middle of the larger group.
  2. It typically uses technology that wasn’t there when the trend of the largely-satisfied need had started.
  3. The creation fulfills a desire that people aren’t even aware they have yet.

Many times, the idea will come from exploring a taboo or a recent social trend, especially a brand-new one. It almost always comes from seeing something that everyone overlooked, and often exists within nature.

One severe requirement of these people succeeding is that they have a high conscientiousness. They don’t necessarily have to be moral, but they must have an incessant aspiration toward specific values to maintain their faith that they can succeed against the inevitable conflicts from the culture around them.

The role will fill a very specific need, so creative risks require engaging with many complete strangers. If it’s a commonplace thing (e.g., toilet paper) it needs lots of volume, but if it fulfills a niche (e.g., phone cases) most people won’t want it so it will require more searching and advertisement.

The engagement with complete strangers will test the creator’s general trust in humanity. If that person can’t trust people in general, other people won’t be as inclined to trust back, since people tend to give equivalent treatment. But, most people are willing to accept their uncertainty about others may lead to good things.

Obsessed

Finding and exploring a specific purpose can be challenging, so most people searching for an elusive need will obsess with fulfilling it. It may be driven by love, virtue, or vice but will always lead to them caring much more about their work than their peers, often to the point of a single-minded and near-religious fanaticism.

Most of the time, a creator will be competing with large-scale organizations. To simply fight it, they’ll obsess with trimming inefficiencies, learning constantly from other risk-takers, doing things that a large system can’t do, and seeking new technologies that could magnify their labor.

People often attribute this entire experience to entrepreneurship, but it encompasses many realms that require marketing with strangers:

  • Job-seeking
  • Investing and venture capitalists
  • Professional artists like writing, music, and visual arts
  • Performance arts, including public speaking and acting
  • Inventing things
  • Colonizing unoccupied territory (though it’s not as common anymore now that the planet has been largely settled)
  • Scientists pursuing unpopular ideas
  • Running a church or not-for-profit organization (i.e., it’s a for-profit organization where the accounting separates profit from expenses)
  • Government organizations which will lose power if they fail or face competition from the private sector or other nations
  • Making a government coup or declaring war

While they’re usually fulfilling a very specific specialization that’s usually a niche of a niche, they don’t often start that way. Instead, they’re doing dozens of tiny tasks across a broader range of disciplines, since nobody else has specialized in that way yet and they’re usually a very small operation. As their organization grows, they can hand off work, but not at first.

To accomplish this, most of the risk-takers have a near-opposite attitude about reality compared to the rest of the members in that group:

  • While most people fear risk, they see opportunities in it.
  • Most people are working as part of a group toward that group’s predefined goal, but they’re constantly deciding to shift their purposes around.
  • While most people are in the early or late majority on most trends, they’re often innovators or early adopters.
  • Most people have great ideas, but don’t want to make the sacrifices for them.
  • Risk-takers often have a severely intense understanding of reality and at least some awareness of what they want.

Success

Their efforts will generally not succeed, simply because they’re trying things that have tremendous risks, and often in competition with large-scale systems that don’t want them to prevail.

However, these risks, when successful, add new value to people in ways nobody could have anticipated. The risk-taker is often honored as the founder of a trend, even when they simply worked hard and remixed others’ works.

Frequently, success in taking social risks requires finding value that wasn’t previously regarded as value, which requires a unique perspective that explores creative and otherwise-taboo perspectives:

  • A city’s gang problem means many young people are finding meaning through honoring a semi-formalized ad-hoc social structure.
  • A high murder rate means people have severe, unspoken feelings that can be redirected toward a more useful goal.
  • Destruction of the environment means many people have likely been productive creating other things.
  • A fading culture or trend means people have adopted a different culture or trend instead.

As you can see, this is a huge vote of confidence in the unknown.

The social class of the risk-taker will often lean upward, but this isn’t strictly the case. Their trajectory all depends on what they’re trying to accomplish. However, money and influence will follow them because others who believe in them will choose to give them power to keep them going.

This success won’t be without opposition. Every new trend means the death of an old one, and the groups losing power will try to shut it down to maintain their way of life. For this reason, most of the individuals who make the risks against established convention will not succeed.

However, the establishment is always fighting a losing battle of attrition with all those risk-takers. They may be able to postpone or destroy smaller groups that start the new trend, at least for a long time:

  • For hundreds of years, the Catholic church didn’t want the Bible published, so they held back the development of the printing press, all the way up until the Protestant Reformation.
  • Thomas Edison used electrical direct current (DC) for his creations. When alternating current (AC) came out as safer and farther-traveling electricity, he used public demonstrations of killing various animals to imply AC was deadlier.
  • Big Ice didn’t want the refrigerator to become a trend. They introduced marketing campaigns that implied parents could lock their children inside and kill them.
  • The Wright brothers invented flight, but then sat on their invention and failed to freely distribute the idea until their intellectual property rights expired.

It never works indefinitely, though. It only persists as long as the public remains unaware of how the new trend’s benefits outweigh its risks. Both sides (innovator and old group) will make huge political shows of their side of the situation.

If the venture can weather it, it becomes the new large group after enough time, ready for another trend to arise and the role to replay itself.

Failure

Risks naturally come with chances of failure. In the case of a new effort, there are many failures for every success.

There are two major sources of failure:

  • Cultural opposition from the risk-taker’s violation of existing standards, which is why the geeks and heretics never reap much from their efforts.
  • Competition from other people doing the same things, which is why the majority never reap those rewards.

For this reason, people who walk the fine line of honoring taboo but also breaking convention can ever win. However, since this is based on feelings, it can change at an instant with a small shift in narrative, and much of it is bound up in luck.

Unfortunately, history tends to forget that aspect. We see the end of the story as we consume it, so we can often overlook how it felt in the middle of it, as well as the many stories of failed attempts for every success story.

A person can lose tremendous power in a huge risk, as well as their willingness to try new things, so most raw risk-takers are younger people in their 20’s and 30’s. When people get older, they often have too much to lose for it to be worthwhile.

Further, even a tremendously successful risk-taker can become very risk-averse as they age. It may be because they’ve gained enough power they have something to lose, or that they’re fatigued from all the existing loss they’ve already incurred.

Incubating

It’s in large groups’ best interests (e.g., governments, huge corporations) to foster risk-takers. Besides cutting down on competition (since they’re profiting directly from it and gaining favor) they can often build and frame the new trends themselves instead of fighting them later.

Unfortunately, no reliable system can “make” risk-takers. Risk-taking is an attitude more than understanding, so the creators are experiencing a highly personal journey of self-discovery as they influence their environment.

What a large group can do, though, is permit those ideas to incubate. By letting that person loosely associate with other people who share their passion, they’re more likely to ally with groups that are part of a larger unit.

Time is a risk-taker’s most significant resource. By giving them the time to learn, explore, tinker, and gain understanding, that person can branch out on their own when they’re ready.


Application

Most people can’t be entrepreneurs because they’re not willing to make the sacrifices to friendships and other purposes to achieve it.

Since every system eventually turns bad from human nature, there’ll always be people breaking free from a group’s leadership somewhere to start something new.

Pay close attention to the heretics, since the new trends will come from them if enough people share their belief.

Literally any place that gives lots of people lots of time, the means to survive, and unfulfilled needs will draw out the creative spark that can build into something profound. Ironically, the best place to give someone lots of time is within a bad system, which often gives trade secrets away to that person as well in the process.

Since every success story has many failure stories attached elsewhere to it, pay close attention to unlikely circumstances that they were entrenched in. Imitating them won’t get you to their status, but trusting in the same kind of luck they played certainly will.

If you’re going to take a risk, keep your head down and stay as undetected as you can for as long as possible. Once you start making ripples across society, expect the big and established systems to come after you with everything they have.

Social risk requires a culture that fosters it, which is why certain countries (e.g., the USA) have way more entrepreneurs than most of the rest, irrespective of the country’s actual economy.

What got you to overwhelming success won’t take you farther into running ever-larger applications of power. Unfortunately, this also means leadership skills (which consider others’ fears) sabotage the drive to perform high-risk tasks over time.

Social risk requires scarcity. When people don’t have a shortage, they don’t maximize their efforts to go as far as possible with the limited amount of something they have.