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

A while ago, while talking with a friend, she asked me for a tip saying that she did not know what to do with her life. She was running in circles for months, without deciding what to do. My answer was simple: “No matter what you choose. Flip a coin and let chance decide”.

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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.

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We all know there is only one certainty in life: that sooner or later we are all going to die. However we all live most of the time misaligned with our true priorities in life.

A lot has been written in the last few months about Randy Pausch, even more so since last week when unfortunately he passed away. So much has been said that most likely you have already seen his last lecture (there is also a short version out of Oprah’s TV show). So this post is not to recommend that you watch it, even if you definitely should if you haven’t yet.

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OK. Here I go. After hesitating for a long long time, I am starting the millionth blog on the internet.

As you may expect, the main subject will be Entrepreneurship, but I plan to write about many different subjects as well. The common ground shall not be Entrepreneurship itself, but Risk.

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