Greater Risk/Reward vs. The Easy/Safe Road

[Neggroll21]

I won't go into detail of what exact choices I'm facing in my life. In general, what do you guys think is the better choice? Taking the harder path that is riskier but provides a much larder reward if things work out. Or going with the easier, safer path of monotony? Thanks.

[airbornehodges]

Depends on how old you are. 30 or younger go for gusto, much older than that take er easy.

[Jay Chow]

Bullshit, doesn't depend on how old you are. Heres what you will receive:

Greater Risk:
Greater reward
A life you want

Easy route:
No risk
A life of boredom and monotony
Little reward


The harder you work, the better you will feel afterwards. Go for the risky route, the risk can't be THAT bad.

[John Alighieri]

You only live once. Just don't live a life full of regrets and what ifs. If there's an easy route I'm sure that route will still be available later on. Only one way to find out sir!

[Tony Toffolo]

Airborne makes a good point but ultimately it depends on how you feel in terms of risk.

I'm talking about PURE risk as in chance. Meaning you might not make a choice because it is risky because there is a lot out of your control VS you perceiving something as risky because you aren't confident in your ability to get shit done.

It's also important to know the difference between talking the talk and walking the walk. It's sometimes tough to make a choice and stick with it.

So like John said, if something is realistically attainable don't pass it up because you don't think you can execute, you'll regret it for sure.

[Jason 'J-Faz' Farren]

I've had some major setbacks happen in my life from taking risks in the past and at a certain point I'd almost given up trying anymore.
But I've found that through these failures other opportunities can be created some I would have never been able to conceive of at the time.
In truth though if I had to do it all again I would because it lead to where and who I am now.
Hopefully that helps some.

[Tony "The Goods" Garcia]

Jay always inspires me with his ideas but this changed my life here lol. Give it a try!

[Josh Passini]

All depends on how many mouths you have to feed. But Go for it at least you can live with the fact you wont have any regrets

[Harry Evans]

I think really that the answer is to take risks at selective, optimal times. For example, selling 20 kilos of cocaine to make a ton of money is probably not worth it, even though the reward is huge. Not leaving your house because you don't want to get hit by a random car is probably not worth playing it safe.

Think of it this way. Say a random risk has a 1 in 100 chance of backfiring. That means that if you take 100 such risks over the period of your life, you may never get screwed, but most likely is that you will get screwed at least once, maybe more. If you take the chance 1000 times, you are almost certainly going to lose a few times. It doesn't matter if your risk is only 1/100, because you hopefully will live a long life full of risks. You will have to take some of them, and you can avoid most. The key is to pick the ones with the best risk/reward ratio, and be selective over when to take chances, but commit when you do, and don't look back. Know at that point that the risk is worthwhile and that you have to take some sometimes. At that point, just do it.

I hate it when stupid friends take huge risks (like the example above) and justify it by saying "it's 1 in 10,000 that I get caught". Sure it is, the first time, but not when you do the same dumb crap every day. It's 1/10k that you will get caught THIS time, but very likely you will get caught at some point in your life.

[Harry Evans]

And yes, I played professional poker for a living for a long time, which is why I answered a lifestyle question with statistics and game theory.