Is Safety a Safe Choice?

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 14:18:34 EST

It's rather common that first of all, people are searching for safety and comfort in their lives. Choosing safety means choosing no risks, or in practice, trying to minimise them. Comfort means no need for going outside our comfort zone, i.e. the environment in which we are used to operate. That's why we go to school, study hard, try to find a stable workplace and, when once found, work hard and save money for pension. However, this may neither be what we actually want nor a safe choice.

Here it is what is typically suggested to the ones preferring safety as the first choice:

* At school: learn everything what is said you should learn; do not hope that this time you can other way round. (Remember classes of some foreign language, where you memorized the whole text without understanding its meaning?)

* At work: do carefully everything that is asked or expected from you irrespective of what you think about it; if you want something to be done well, do it by yourself or give explicit guidelines of how to do it. (Remember thinking that a task hasn't point at all, but still doing it without asking questions? Or redoing things that you had asked someone else to do but found they not have been done as you thought they should have been?)

* In terms of personal finances: avoid every kind of credits, except home loan maybe as you still need to live somewhere; when investing your money, diversify your risks and avoid being overly aggressive (Remember several examples given to you about over-borrowed people? Remember pension fund as the first investment product that is recommended to you?)

These suggestions might be reasonable in a stable environment, where business landscape and economic structure are formed (among others, this would mean no notable lay-offs and/or no need to change ones profession), prices, interest rates and exchange rates stable (among others, this would mean no notable decrease in purchasing power of the saved money) or at least predicable based on historical data, and all risks measurable (among others, this would enable to manage risks using conventional methods and tools). However, without going into details, as one easily can see in the current turbulent times, stability of the environment is not the case. The more advanced technologies become available, the more rapidly it is changing and the more leveraged are the changes.

Basing to the above, we can say, that the so-called safety is rather an illusion or even an expression of Ostrich Syndrome (according to this syndrome, when not looking at something, we hope that it isn't really there). During good times living in accordance with this illusion is just tedious, but during turbulent times it's scaring. When choosing safety (as defined above), what one is actually choosing, is:

* One-sided education: up to now, in the school one is trained for climbing on career ladder, but not for owning this ladder.

* Lost time: given a safe workplace and comfortable life-style, one is not motivated to take risks and try something new or different; instead, the fear of doing something wrong prevails. But as often correctly pointed out by the coaches of personal leadership: doing the same things every day doesn't give new results.

* Restricted freedom and dependence from somebody's will: when only following the instructions of somebody else, one newer will learn to make knowledgeable choices and take the decisions with whole responsibility; one is going to be programmed to think in a pre-defined direction, but not freely (i.e. not to ask questions like "Why?" and "Could it be achieved other way round?"); if being paid sufficiently, there is also no motivation to actually learn dealing with money and to operate in the circumstances of limited resources. This all makes a person considerably less flexible and, as a result, narrows the possibilities to choose.

* Basing her/his life to a social agreement: money is nothing else than a social agreement, the value of which decreases or even disappears when this agreement is broken.

When summarising, I can't say that safety as the first choice is safe. That's why I'm searching for alternatives.

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Is Safety a Safe Choice?