Risk miscalibration

In the past year, I’ve come to a long overdue realization that I am not well calibrated to risk.

Allow me to illustrate with some stories.

When I was in high school, I had a minor rotator cuff tear snowboarding down a double black diamond chute. I had only been snowboarding for 2 years at the time, but I was surrounded by people who had been skiing and snowboarding since they were kids (particularly my girlfriend who was on the ski team), so I felt like I needed to catch up.

When I was 31, I decided I needed to learn to backcountry ski despite not ever having skied. So I tried rapidly learning one winter. It was the end of the day and my legs were pretty tired, but I decided to power through and do one more run, and I chose an icy slope that I wasn’t fully comfortable with. That’s how I tore my ACL. What’s more, when I fell and felt a weird sensation in my knee, I stood up twice to try to slowly make my way to the bottom of the slope, but my knee gave out again both times. It’s possible I wouldn’t have fully torn it had I not done that.

I took up road/gravel cycling recently and thought I might enjoy learning to mountain bike. I had a particular familiar, safe route in mind, but I went with a friend who had a harder route in mind. I could simply have not joined this ride, or advocated for my route, but instead I went along with it. All sorts of things went wrong on the bike - one person’s bike had some tire issues, and we were running late with limited time after work. I wasn’t really in the headspace for a ride that went past dark. In any case, I went on the ride, on the hard route, and I fell and cracked a rib.

About 6 weeks into the healing process for the rib, things started to feel better. Between the rib injury and the knee issues, I had a lot of pent up energy (I’m used to working out most days). I really wanted to do something higher intensity so I did some kettlebell swings, which led to a big flare up in pain that took over a week to resolve.

One last story, this time not about physical injuries. I worked at a startup where I was generally well-regarded. I had a nice stack of grants, and was even given a retention grant with an attractive vesting schedule. I didn’t understand that a company that wasn’t growing much could still be acquired for a handsome sum of money. I was getting frustrated for various reasons, so I left, not realizing that there was a risk I could be leaving some significant money on the table.

Looking back at these stories and others like them, most seem completely avoidable to me. Why do I take risks like this?

As I age, the consequences of this risk taking build upon each other. The time and financial commitment to dealing with my knee troubles are significant. We don’t have enough money yet to afford a home in the bay area, and we likely would have had I not dodged that money.

So, it’s safe to say I am miscalibrated to risk.

How do I calibrate?

What leads to me taking a risky decision in the first place? What blinds me to the risk?

In every example I can think of, some part of me understood I was taking a risk, but other parts of me overrode that understanding and compromised my judgment.

Sometimes I was caught up in adrenaline, or I had momentum making progress in injury recovery and get ahead of myself. I push through pain and discomfort almost instinctively. Sometimes this has served me well, but it also gets me into trouble.

Often there is underlying frustration that I feel like I need to learn faster, catch up to others faster, and explore more aspects of life, so I push outside of my comfort zone. I’ve felt this since I was a kid emerging from an isolated, fundamental religious upbringing into the real world. In some ways this desire to push myself outside of my comfort zone has been a positive force in my life (I lived abroad! Found a love for the outdoors! Chose a career I like!), but unchecked it seems to result in a neverending quest to “catch up”, even when I have caught up in so many ways. I seem to not understand limits, or why I might want to impose a limit on myself.

Sometimes I seem to not trust myself. For example, I’ve known since immediately after my ACL reconstruction that something wasn’t right with how the knee moves. I knew it would hurt after surgery, but it felt biomechanically off, as if my tibia is too far ahead of my femur. Also the knee just felt tight, for lack of a better term. It’s an odd sensation but it is consistent. But I let surgeons convince me this could happen, only to find out 5 years after my ACL reconstruction that my ACL was in fact placed incorrectly, and it was the cause of the cyclops lesion results in surgery #2, and all the ensuing patellar cartilage damage that led me to surgeries #3 and #4.

What should I change?

There are a few things I’m trying to change about my relationship to risk.

I’d like to have a healthier relationship with limitations, and in general be at peace with the skills I have and the choices I have made. It would be nice to not always feel like I need to catch up.

I need to be okay with not growing in every area of my life all the time. Sometimes a relationship doesn’t need to be constantly reflected on and improved, it can just be there, steady and supportive. I don’t have to be trying a new role at work all the time, or always pushing to be as high growth as possible. Sometimes something is kind of broken, but there just isn’t time or energy to resolve it immediately, and maybe that’s okay. I can trust that I won’t let things stay bad for too long.

I need to trust myself more, and learn to listen to that voice trying to tell me when I’m taking unnecessary risks. I don’t need to do that extra ski run - I should just have a hot chocolate at the lodge with my friend instead.

Most of all, I need to slow down and take things step by step. Sometimes things are just frustrating, like working on a product I don’t believe in or dealing with the consequences of a surgeon’s mistakes. Rushing to a solution or taking an uninformed leap of faith is not the way out. Sometimes, I should slow down to figure out the right plan. Other times, I just need to accept that progress will be slow and setbacks will occur.