Kreamer - Risk/reward: why intelligent leaps and daring choices are the best career moves you can make

This is a book about risk. Not the adrenaline-spiking, bungee-jumping, double-or-nothing, high-stakes-poker kind of risk, but rather the risks that all of us with jobs and careers and professional ambitions do or dont takeand which we may or may not even be aware of as we proceed through our working lives. In the deeply uncertain and volatile American workscape of the twenty-first century, individual success and contentment depend upon developing and refining a regular habit of assessing and taking small and sometimes large risks.

Risk is most often understood as a negative, something foolhardy and always to be avoided. Thats because we humans are evolutionarily conditioned to assume the worst when facing the unknown. Is that berry poisonous? Is that a lion in the distance? For our ancient ancestors, survival depended on the ability to infer a threat and make a split-second decision between fight and flight.

At the same time were also wired to be cautious, to default to the familiar, holding our turf when facing dangers that are less acute. Our protohuman ancestors in east Africa lived in trees. But at a certain point, drought started destroying and shrinking their forests. No doubt for centuries they contemplated leaving their comfortable arboreal existence for life on the groundand for centuries rejected that option because the dangersthink: lionswere more immediately terrifying than the slow-motion destruction of their age-old habitat. But having gauged the various risk factors over generations, our ancestors ultimately decided to come down out of the trees, accept the risk of predators and the unknown, and colonize the landand, as it turned out, become human.

Today we mostly dont have to deal with the kinds of existential dangers that our ancestors on the African savanna or even in early America faced. But the current upending of the economic and social status quo and of the ways weve become accustomed to earning our living is definitely a threat.

When I graduated from college and started working full-time in the 1970s, most of us expected wed pick a career and stick with it for life, and working for decades for a single organization was still a common and reasonable scenario. Whether one was a lawyer, manufacturing line worker, teacher, salesperson, or reporter, there was an assumption of a clear, predictable professional trajectory. People anticipated theyd pay their dues, rise through the ranks, and retire with a fixed pension. There were risks, of course, but the risks tended to be short-term and specificmore lion in the grass than long-term drought.

Thats no longer true. The working world has become a place where risk runs rampant: Secure jobs are becoming obsolete, the industries in which weve worked are disappearing altogether, entirely new kinds of businesses are arising overnight, pensions and other retirement benefits are disappearing, we are under constant pressure to stay technologically current, demands on our time in and outside the workplace are expandingsuddenly all these concerns are universal, chronic, and stressful. Even if youre someone who can reasonably expect to work in one discipline over the course of a lifetime, the need to respond and adapt to technological and organizational upheavals means your work is transforming at a rate similar to that of those who career-hop.

Circumstances beyond our control can quickly alter our jobs and expectations and long-range plans, for the worse or for the better and sometimes botha company being sold, a start-up failing, a call from a headhunter, a pension reduced, a chance encounter on a plane with a potential investor, a pink slip. Keeping ones head down and doing the work competently used to insulate the vast majority of workers from job disruption, but today this approach is among the greatest risks of all. Todays working world is constantly fluctuating and fast paced. Jobs and job categories are being destroyed and created in a matter of a few years rather than decades, leaving behind people who are uncomfortable with change.

More and more of us, voluntarily and involuntarily, are making high-risk professional zigs and zags, jumping into the unknown of new working landscapes without much in the way of predictable outcomes or safety nets. The making-it-up-as-they-go-along, self-employed-in-multiple-freelance-jobs, who-knows-whats-next fraction of the population is growing fast. According to a recent MIT report, approximately half the jobs being created as the economy recovers from the Great Recession will be freelance; and according to a study from the financial services software company Intuit, 40 percent of us, maybe sixty million Americans, will be in some measure self-employed by the end of this decade. These are huge numbers. By the day, we are creating new businesses or professions that barely existed a decade ago. Theres even a new term of art, solopreneurs, that encompasses individuals designing apps, creating virtual stores, managing social media, and coaching people in their lives and work.