Santiago Bilinkis l Risk and Reward - Trying to live a life out of the comfort zone

In this world, there is no sure recipe to succeed. But making sure we fail is quite easy and we can do it ourselves, without help from anyone.

A few years ago I read the book “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho. I did not like it at all. The basic philosophy can be summed up in that “when a person really wants something, the whole universe conspires so she/he can realize her/his dream.” It is, in short, the prototypical “you can”, carried to the extreme.

This week I wrote a post on the impact of the financial crisis. In a comment, with great diplomacy Ines (which by one of those coincidences happens to be my mom!) objected to my vision of the crisis as an opportunity, assimilating it to that kind of philosophy.

I acknowledge I may have sounded like that, but nothing is further from my way of thinking. This is a world that in general conspires so that most people do not have what we want. It is almost never true that “if you want to, you can”.

Both the “if you want, you can” and its logically equivalent “If you can not is because you do not want to” are cruel oversimplifications. They generate false expectations, then put the blame on us when we fail.
In my view there is, however, a very important rule that is almost universal: “If you DO NOT want, you can NOT”.

What this rule says is quite different from the other two. It states that something good never occurs without the power of the will to make it happen. The will is not enough, but it is essential.

Once, in a talk I spoke about the challenges of making a project grow. There, I said that one of the reasons why Officenet grew so much was that since its very beginning Andy and I wanted to make it very large . This is not saying that it grew large simply because we wanted it to, but that it would not have happened if we did not.

Achieving something involves making an effort, taking a risk, facing the likely possibility of failure. Only having the guts to fail we get a chance of getting what we want. To anyone who believes that he/she can not, who chooses not to try, failure is all but assured.

With the World crisis happens something similar. The crisis is damaging to many and only beneficial to a few. Closes lots of doors and opens one or two. If we choose to see the crisis as an opportunity, there is a chance, perhaps small, we can find some of the doors that just opened. If, on the other hand, we see only the bad side, it is certain that we will be among the victims of this context.
Intensely wanting something to happen is the starting point to have a chance of succeeding. Finding the will power to fight for what we want, even with the odds against it, is the next step.

As I began saying, in this World there is no recipe that can guarantee success. But making sure of failure is quite easy and we can do without help from anything or anyone.

Photo: agnisflugen