Taking Risks: Success is defined by the possibility of failure

This is a guest post by Caitlin Kelly of Broadside blog.

If you told me to jump out of an airplane or try rock-climbing or bungee-jumping or riding a motorbike, I’d say no thanks. I hate heights. Most physical risks leave me cold.

But when I was 25, I left behind my apartment, dog, freelance writing clients and live-in boyfriend eager to marry me – and moved alone to France for eight months for a journalism fellowship. I was desperate for a break and a change, but I knew getting on that plane would – as it did – forever change my life and how I saw myself living it.

Sure enough, I came back to Toronto, ditched the boyfriend and got the best job ever, aglow with the sort of confidence I could never have attained sitting safely at home.

During my fellowship I had taken all sorts of risks that even my mother, a woman who had traveled the world alone for years, found a little… misguided. Like getting into a truck with a French truck-driver who spoke no English and driving from the south of France to Istanbul for a story. Sleeping in the truck on a bunk about two feet away from a man 10 years my senior I had never met. For eight days.

Best trip of my life!
It cemented, early, my conviction that selective professional, intellectual, emotional, creative and athletic risk-taking is a highly under-rated activity, especially for girls and women, as so many of us, still, are programmed to play it safe: pick the right school/grad school/man/job/apartment. Strap in and hang on!

Zzzzzzzzzzzz.

I think it’s the worst advice anyone can give a woman, and millions of us grow up listening to a chorus of people trying to dissuade us from trying the very things that will likely help us grow (up) a lot faster and in more interesting ways than simply taking the easier and less risky conventional path.

I grew up in a family of talented creative folk, who wrote and directed and edited films, television shows and magazines for a living. No one ever had a paycheck or a pension. It was balls-to-the-wall. So I knew early that risks bring rewards, and rejection — we had steak years and hamburger years. I learned, as I still do, to splurge on lovely and durable items (cashmere, a car) when I have the cash because next year… who knows? I learned to save money, live low and ferret out great consignment and thrift shop deals in my leaner years.

One of the tricks to risk-taking is making sure you’ve got a safety net before you leap: good health, savings in the bank, little to no debt and the consistent self-discipline to ruthlessly separate wants (flat-screen TV, new car, iPad) from needs (groceries, a safe vehicle, health insurance.)

I took another risk after I lost my fancy newspaper job, as a reporter for the New York Daily News, in 2006. I couldn’t find anything else and, desperate for steady cash to supplement my freelance income, took a retail job at a local mall for $11 an hour. This was in September 2007, long before the recession, and friends and family were puzzled by my choice.

Why would I work for so little? Retail? I was 50 at the time, more than 20 to 30 years older than almost all my co-workers.

I took the risk of trying something new, something utterly out of my comfort zone. My ego took a beating, as everyone does in retail, with snotty customers.

But that risk paid off in ways I could never have quite imagined; my second book, “Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail” was published in April 2011, called “an excellent memoir” by Entertainment Weekly.

And my life during those two years – how weird is this? – has been optioned by CBS as a possible sitcom.

Risk is not a four-letter word.

Dull is!

*****

Caitlin Kelly is the author of Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail and Blown Away: American Women and Guns.

Caitlin blogs about women, writing and work at Broadside.  She also helps other writers to excel through her expert coaching and editing services.

July 26, 2011 | Categories: The adventures of Machiavelli Id | Tags: blogging, Risk, travel, work, writing | 1 Comment »