The 30-Second Guide to Taking Better Risks Every Day

Yesterday, I was working out in the park when it started to rain. By the time I made it through my second set of exercises, it was coming down in buckets, and I wasn’t having a lot of fun.

“I’m going home,” I said to myself. “This is ridiculous.”

But then—like magic—I remembered one of the fundamental rules of exercise: It only works when you actually do it. So, I clenched my jaw, furrowed my brow, did five more push ups and said to myself, “I’ll wait one more minute for this downpour to let up.”

30 seconds later, the rain stopped and I finished my workout without another drop. Superman body, here I come!

But what if I hadn’t waited those 30 extra seconds? What if I’d given up and gone home to watch YouTube and eat potato chips? What if I made all my decisions that way?

Her are just a few things that would never have happened:

I certainly wouldn’t have finished my workout yesterday. I’d be sitting on the couch wishing the rain would stop—a silly wish for an Oregonian—rather than actually working to improve myself.
I wouldn’t have started this site. In 2008 when the stock market crashed, lots of people I know lost all their money because they were impatient. I stuck to my plan to wait it out and keep investing. If I hadn’t, I’d have never had the financial cushion I needed to work on this site for nearly a year before getting paid.
I wouldn’t be a very happy person. My happiness is often tied to how patient I’m willing to be to wait for what I want. The longer I keep myself calm, the more often things turn out well for me. And even if I don’t get what I want, I tend not to care because patience builds up my Zen Ninja™ skills.

Time: The Magical Tool of The Advanced Riskologist

Time is a magical tool. Those who harness it properly find themselves with great wealth and fortune. But those who allow it to harness them fight an uphill battle all their lives.

Therefore, learning the art of patience and properly harnessing time is a mandatory Riskologist skill.

What the novice Riskologist struggles with is knowing when to wait patiently and when to act urgently—an important distinction. With practice, knowing the right thing to do becomes second nature. But when your patience muscle is weak and undeveloped—like a baby giraffe trying to climb a tree—you find yourself waiting around twiddling your thumbs when you should be springing to action. Or, you panic and act in fear when you should just sit still for a minute.

Luckily, there’s a very simple set of rules you can follow to know exactly what to do and when:

If it hurts a lot, act immediately!
If it hurts a little, wait 30 seconds and reassess.

Even a baby Riskologist can follow these rules and often does without even realizing it!

But there’s one more hurdle you must clear to put this rule to work like a true Riskologist badass: You must practice relentlessly to increase your patience threshold.

When you’ve fully developed your patience muscle—like a Kung Fu ninja breaking bricks with his face—you know that if something hurts a lot, it’s a big deal. But if your patience muscle is weak—like a sloth with three tranquilizer darts in its neck—you’ll continue to struggle and take poor risks because you’ll spring to action in great pain when the threat is quite low.

If I were a giant wussypants about the rain and the cold, I would have given up on my workout yesterday. I would have come home and sat around no stronger in body or mind.

Luckily, I have nearly 5 years of practice running in the cold and rain that inform my decisions now. I can say—with quite a lot of certainty—that if I get wet, I will not melt.

And I know my goals are more important to me than the momentary comfort I’d get from giving up on them for a day. I also know that giving up on a goal one day makes it easier to give up on it a second day. These are all lessons I learned by continuously flexing my patience muscle until it became strong, like a herd of bison pushing a boulder up a hill.

The Patience Muscle: Your Key to Great Fortunes

This same patience muscle served me well in 2008 when everyone lost all their money in the stock market crash. As the market began to head downward, everyone who’d practiced day trading and watching 24-hour news channels for years panicked and began to sell. Their patience muscles were weak, like a squirrel without a nut in the dead of winter.

But I’d always learned to save money—not waste it—which is hard to do if you’re buying and selling stock every day while listening to talking heads yell different advice at you all day long. And I’d sold my TV and given up on the news more than a year before, so I didn’t even know the market was crashing until after it already had.

While everyone was panicking and selling their stocks, I and a few others not only held our investments, we bought more of them. Our patience muscles were strong, like an eagle clasping a fish in its razor sharp talons. Just a few years later, the market is back and going gangbusters. My retirement account is safe, sound, and miles ahead of where it would be had I needlessly panicked.

The impatient felt the pain of the crash every day while they watched their balances fall. They couldn’t handle it—they panicked. But the patient only felt the pain on the rare occasions they even remembered to check their accounts. When they felt they were about to crack, they counted to 30 and remembered that markets always work in cycles.

The Patient Russian Who Saved the World from Nuclear Armageddon

There’s a famous Cold War story about the day the world almost ended in mutual nuclear annihilation thanks to none other than a fast-moving patch of clouds.

At the height of the war, the US and the USSR had enough nuclear missiles pointed at each other to wipe out half the earth, and soldiers on both continents sat up 24 hours a day watching radar screens, looking for incoming missiles.

On September 26, 1983, Stanislav Petrov was at his station in the USSR watching his green radar screen when he saw something that looked like an incoming missile. If he’d followed orders, he’d have reported his findings immediately. They would have run all the way up the chain of command where top Soviet officials would have about 5 minutes to decide whether to launch an all-out counterstrike before being wiped out themselves—mutual annihilation.

But Stanislav’s patience muscle was strong, like a borscht fed Greco-Roman wrestler raised on the Siberian Tundra. Instead of panicking, he waited 30 seconds and took a better reading. He decided there were no missiles coming and didn’t report a threat. Later investigation revealed what Stanislav saw was actually a patch of fast-moving clouds with the sun shining on them in just the right way to make them appear as missiles to a radar detector.

What if it hadn’t been Stanislav watching the screen that day? What if it had been one of his lazy colleagues with a weak patience muscle, like a 4-year-old trying to pickup an anvil?

We could all be living in a post-nuclear Mad Max style dystopian world. I, for one, am glad Stanislav exercised his patience muscle and made the right decision.

Your Homework Assignment

It’s not difficult to wait just 30 seconds for something. Once you’ve done it a few times, it becomes quite natural. And your patience muscle is one that defies the laws of physics and anatomy—it has no upper bound. 30 seconds can easily turn into a minute. Then a day. Then a month. A year. A lifetime.

There are things I would have done years ago—faced with panic and a weak patience muscle—that don’t even cross my mind today. I’ll never do them again for the rest of my life. It’s easy now; I don’t even think about it.

To improve your own risk-taking skills and achieve expert Riskologist status, you too must work each day to strengthen your patience muscle. When you feel the twinge of fear—that weakness that tells you to turn and run—wait 30 seconds and ask yourself if it’s still the right decision.

Spoiler alert: It isn’t.

Now, I have some homework for you.

In the comments below, I want you to share one area of your life where your patience muscle is weak, like a vegan at a bodybuilding competition. Then, tell us what you plan to do to strengthen it, like a lion chasing a gazelle across the Serengeti.

I look forward to your responses.