If you think like most people, you'll predict a clear advantage for the risk takers. Yet the study showed the exact opposite: Entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs had 33 percent lower odds of failure than those who quit.
If you're risk averse and have some doubts about the feasibility of your ideas, it's likely that your business will be built to last. If you're a freewheeling gambler, your startup is far more fragile.#1432•
Like the Warby Parker crew, the entrepreneurs whose companies topped Fast Company's recent most innovative lists typically stayed in their day jobs even after they launched. Former track star Phil Knight started selling running shoes out of the trunk of his car in 1964, yet kept working as an accountant until 1969.
After inventing the original Apple I computer, Steve Wozniak started the company with Steve Jobs in 1976 but continued working full time in his engineering job at Hewlett-Packard until 1977.
And although Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin figured out how to dramatically improve internet searches in 1996, they didn't go on leave from their graduate studies at Stanford until 1998.
"We almost didn't start Google," Page says, because we "were too worried about dropping out of our Ph.D.
program."#1444•
Coombs suggested that in their daily lives, successful people do the same thing with risks, balancing them out in a portfolio. When we embrace danger in one domain, we offset our overall level of risk by exercising caution in another domain#1431•
If you're about to bet aggressively in blackjack, you might drive below the speed limit on your way to the casino.#1436•
Risk portfolios explain why people often become original in one part of their lives while remaining quite conventional in others#1430•
As Polaroid founder Edwin Land remarked, "No person could possibly be original in one area unless he were possessed of the emotional and social stability that comes from fixed attitudes in all areas other than the one in which he is being original."#1433•
Having a sense of security in one realm gives us the freedom to be original in another.#1434•
Instead, successful originals take extreme risks in one arena and offset them with extreme caution in another#1435•
As the great thinker W. E. B. DuBois wrote, "He was one of you and yet he became Abraham Lincoln."#1442•
7
"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep."
Scott Adams#1448•
In Justin Berg's study of circus performances, although circus managers made more accurate forecasts than artists, they still weren't very good, especially regarding the most novel acts. Managers tend to be too risk averse: they focus on the costs of investing in bad ideas rather than the benefits of piloting good ones, which leads them to commit a large number of false negatives.
The author of the initial report on the Seinfeld pilot felt it was on the border between "weak" and "moderate." He was leaning toward moderate, but his boss overruled him and rated it weak.#1452•
In the face of uncertainty, our first instinct is often to reject novelty, looking for reasons why unfamiliar concepts might fail#1443•
"If you're gonna make connections which are innovative," Steve Jobs said back in 1982, "you have to not have the same bag of experience as everyone else does."#1445•
3: Out on a Limb (Speaking Truth to Power)
Eminent psychologist Robert Zajonc called it the mere exposure effect: the more often we encounter something, the more we like it. When he showed people the nonsense words iktitaf and sarick for the first time, the two words tested as equally appealing. But when Zajonc presented either one of those words twice before the comparative test, people developed a preference for it—and liking increased further after five, ten, and twenty-five views.#566•
4: Fools Rush In (Timing, Strategic Procrastination, and the First-Mover Disadvantage)
Procrastination may be the enemy of productivity, but it can be a resource for creativity#554•
7: Rethinking Groupthink (The Myths of Strong Cultures, Cults, and Devil’s Advocates)
Minority viewpoints are important, not because they tend to prevail but because they stimulate divergent attention and thought," finds Berkeley psychologist Charlan Nemeth, one of the world's leading experts on group decisions. "As a result, even when they are wrong they contribute to the detection of novel solutions and decisions that, on balance, are qualitatively better."#544•