![Audacity: How You Know It's Time to Jump [A Theory of Managed Risk]](https://billwhittle2.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/TVS-147-THUMBNAIL-e1658577385201.jpg)
Faced with a life-changing choice with potential for great rewards — but which could have devastating consequences — how do you know when it’s time to jump. Is it time for a theory of managed risk that will equip you with appropriate audacity?
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16 replies on “Audacity: How You Know It’s Time to Jump -> A Theory of Managed Risk”
“All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger, but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.”
A minor correction: It was Wayne Gretzky who said, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” Here are a couple more of Gretzky’s quotes that relate to this episode —
“Only one thing is ever guaranteed, that is that you will definitely not achieve the goal if you don’t take the shot.”
“Not doing it is certainly the best way to not getting it.”
“Going for it” audacity is not seen very often in societies rooted in faiths other than western Judeo-Christian. Similarly, capitalism is more conducive to audacity, as reward is more of a possibility. Having faith rooted in ‘free will’ and seeking reward through risk is as much of a definition of “the Yank” making an imprint into the world of the 20th century as there is.
Our 21st century emasculation of this culture is profoundly disheartening.
It strikes me that the opportunity to exercise audacity is largely (though not totally) a function of the society in which the person lives. America’s relative freedom, compared to closed societies (e.g. communist or islamic societies) is why our nation has flourished in so many ways over those others. (Unfortunately, as you pointed out, it’s also why America has plunged itself into depths of depravity not seen in those societies, either.)
This episode may be the most practically helpful of your series (for me). I’ve been planning to launch a venture with a relatively shallow potential downside and stratospheric potential upside, yet I’ve STILL been less than enthusiastic about launching it. While some medical issues have temporarily preempted implementation regardless of my enthusiasm level, I’ve taken a perverse comfort in this involuntary delay. THANK YOU for this attitude adjustment!
Zo…you didn’t hear. The JWST is irreparably damaged. It supposedly got hit by a micrometeoroid. Or at least that’s what they claim. But the first images they showed us were not good as they pretended they were. Those lens flares were artifacts of a bad imaging system. You could actually see a honeycomb structure in those flares, when you zoomed in. They were image anomalies from the camera itself.
You have to be flexible. I went “all in”on a market/cafe/gas station in the middle of the desert. Unfortunately my landlord was a sociopath so he stole my business. I was out $250K. So I packed up and moved to Albania. Beautiful beaches, wonderful weather, great restaurants, honest locals – all for half my Social Security. Meanwhile, my ex-landlord is stuck in the desert surrounded by a community that hates him.
I have to wonder .. I can’t remember where I heard it … probably from one of the nuns, that God created man because He was lonely. If we were, in fact, created in His image, this is easy for us to understand. Imagine being the only consciousness in infinity. Have you watched the TV series “Alone”? The most compelling reason most people tap out is that they miss their loved ones, and it often surprises them just how intensely and how much.
The other thing is, we love and we want to be loved. And “compelled” love is not love. Free will gives us the ability to truly love. And I think that part of our need for people is our need to be loved. I know it sounds heretical to say that God “needs” something – but the fact of the matter is we cannot ever really fully understand God in our present state. So maybe God needs to be loved. At the very least, He wants to be loved. And we can’t really love Him without the ability to chose to do it freely.
Again, this is essentially what the nuns told us when I was in grade school.
We are God. God views creation through us.
That is certainly another way of looking at it, though I do think it has its pitfalls.
I read a lot of Alan Watts in my earlier days, and that’s ALMOST how he described it.
But if we ARE God, then there is no moral code we need to follow. We can do whatever we want to do, and it can’t be wrong. Want to steal your neighbor’s TV or shoot up a school? See how this goes wrong?
I always loved the sound of God feeling lonely, but I’ve reached a place in life where I think God has so much love that He only wished to increase it and share it, even as unnecessary as it may have been. As a Trinity, it leaves very little to be lacking, as relationship already exists within himself, apart from creation, but the Holy Spirit rejoiced in his creation, as we read in proverbs. It is in God’s nature to generously share his love. To NOT create would have suggest to me that he has an ego directed to himself, but, luckily for us, that is not our God.
“… I think God has so much love that He only wished to increase it and share it…”
That does sound a little bit like being lonely. I mean, for a God, anyway. 😉
I think the fact of the matter is like the Universe itself (which just may BE God … I don’t know) is something we can’t completely wrap our heads around. We have used religion to make Him more “accessible” to us. More relatable. As much as we may be mini-images of Him … mini-partial manifestations of Him … we’re not … you know …. HIM.
Though it’s true that being a creature, and creation itself, doesn’t make us any more God, what was given to us as revealed by what he inspired to be recorded, that the world was created out of nothing and not out of himself, as was his Son, ‘begotten not made’. Nor do we ourselves imagine our spit or our breath any more a part of us, they did indeed issue out of our body. Christ, having come of God, and not merely by Him, can never be anything ‘other’ than God (John 8:55). Truth from truth, remains truth. And though everything made by God is good, or begins good, by its own will can experience that fall (Matthew 13:25), whether by its own or by subversion, yet Christ, who shares the same will, is not capable of evil, since he subjects himself to his Father’s will always (found expressed also in that same chapter 8 of John’s Gospel).
But what I’m trying to get at, is that Man was made in likeness to God in the beginning, and in that likeness was the first to create a relationship with us that by design was always intended to be able to rise to sharing in the creator, not just as servants or friends, but true children (John 8:35). And this is only possible through Christ, through whom everything is made possible, and who is potential itself. If the Universe itself can be God, it is only God through Christ, because it is only by Christ that change can be possible, because change was made possible through him, by becoming LESS or having in himself the possibility of becoming more perfect by that decrease (Hebrews 2:7-10). We all know that in this creation there are seasons, and the the Holy Spirit is often depicted as a reservoir of information, both past and present. In John’s Revelation Christ is depicted as the Spirit of Prophecy, which foretells what is to come. But how I like to describe the Trinity is as a palm tree, the trunk and the roots being the past and the hidden heaven by the roots, with each segment being like an age or epoch, but the branches represented as all possible and potential futures. To me, I like this image, because I then enjoy palm Sunday that much more. Anyway, I’m distracted from the point that The Father determined to made God into man when his Son wished Man to resemble God. The Lord is funny in that way, to have a contrast always in mind in his creating anything new. The fires of the Spirit in Its creating powers were given a contrast by the fires of negation and destruction, which saw but could never understand, much like the darkness could also not (John 1:5). Yet what was ‘created’ was able to wage war with what was of God, but whatever power power negation seems to have was always permitted or given freely for a final purpose (John 10:18). So if Christ, being of God who is purely spirit (John 4:24), can become man (or even the entire material Universe: John 1:3) can we reason that the reverse is then possible? Can Christ take what was purely created and share or impart of himself with his creature? Those of us who believe fully in the Eucharist believe this to be so, and that in fact, his words to those who doubt him are expressed in such a way that we MUST eat and drink for it to be possible (John 6:53).
It doesn’t have to make sense, we just have to believe. Just as much as we must take on faith that a spiritual eternal and infinite Being can at all enter a limited and finite realm to become a mortal and limited human man. The only point I would stress is that this union with God may come to Jesus Christ by a shared nature, we, on the other hand, could only enjoy the same by a continued participation. And because the seeds that were sown by the enemy from the beginning force the present constraints (Matthew 13:24-30), a new creation is called forth to take the place of the old. For if there was nothing wrong with the first, there would have been no need to promise another.
Along a similar vein, I wouldn’t say that God is beyond our understanding, that his inscrutable ways are so far out of reach as to make the attempt a fruitless endeavor. I disagree with this sentiment wholeheartedly. God may not be understood as a whole anymore than any man can walk into a library and expect the information of every single volume to go directly into his brain. In fact, the very possibility could break the mortal mind of any man thoroughly and promptly. Yet, in part, I do believe God’s ways can be followed and known, as in taking one book from the shelf at a time. Our lives are much the same, since every man can know a lot about so many things, or specialize in, or find mastery over, few.
The very act of creating man in His own image requires this to be so. Otherwise, our likeness to God would be no different than dressing an ape in a tuxedo and comparing him to a man; it would be a bad joke on God’s part at our expense. But since I cannot attribute maliciousness or meanness to God, to laugh at our attempt to ‘ape’ God, I must take the side that he earnestly wants us to seek — and to find — him. The promise after all was that those who seek would find, and not that those who seek might find.
This is a test to see if I can post a comment on this post without being filtered by the spam filter.
Roger. At least for the moment. I’m working on this issue. Thanks, Phil.
I just located a log that tracks denials, and whitelisted a bunch of them. BTW, there’s a huge volume of Russian bot spam attempts and other trash hitting this site continually.
The Russian (and other) bots are out there all the time hitting pretty much everyone. I suppose if they don’t like what you’re producing here maybe they’re hitting this one harder.
Or maybe it’s aliens in Area 51 who have been enslaved by the CIA cleverly posing as Russian bots …
But whatever it is, I understand, you have to do something to get them blocked, and it’s a “Stainless Steel Rat” problem, in the end (yeah, look that one up).