Slow Risk

Most people react too quickly to problems.

I’ll use parenting as an example, but this is far beyond just a problem parents have. Let’s say you’re watching your young kid play in the backyard. You’re enjoying a book and some lemonade and they’re running around being a kid. Over the course of about an hour, that kid will do maybe 70 or 80 things that will look like they might turn into a disaster. They’ll pick up a rock, and some part of your brain will yell at you: “They’re going to throw that rock through a window! They’re going to try to eat it! They’re going to stab themselves in the eye with it! TELL THEM TO PUT IT DOWN!”

And of course, they aren’t going to do any of that stuff. They might put it in their pocket or use it to dig up other rocks, but it’s not going to be a disaster. If you wait 3 more seconds, you’ll see it. If you react immediately, you’ll not only give your kid a complex, but you’ll end up never reading that book and stressing yourself out and just going absolutely nuts.

This is most people, with most problems. An email comes in with a question about a project proposal you submitted. You freak out, your brain saying: “Did I forget to include that info? Did I do a bad job? Do I need to cover and scramble and come up with an excuse? Do I need to frantically drop whatever I’m working on right now and address this?” But if you wait, maybe 5 minutes later here comes the email: “Never mind, found the info on the next slide. Thanks!”

Very few situations will resolve any differently if you wait half an hour to address them instead of reacting immediately, but a large number will resolve themselves in that time. This is like the way animals do threat assessment: if you panic at the first sight of any predator, you waste so many calories running when you don’t have to that you’ll drop dead before any predator gets near you. Likewise, if you react immediately to every problem you’ll never live your life and you’ll end up creating more problems anyway.

Practice taking a calm measure of new information. Absorb, consider, then act. Reacting is an automatic response; it means the problem is controlling you, instead of the reverse.