Imagine a person who puts on a ski suit on a hot summer day because “what if it snows?” Yes, safety is important, but if you over-insure yourself always and everywhere, you risk looking strange at best, and suffering from heatstroke at worst. Of course, as libertarians, we adore freedom of choice and personal responsibility. But when it comes to designing a product, a policy, or another “revolutionary” startup, many suddenly turn into apostles of insurance against the universal flood, literally screaming: “What if a meteorite hits? Let’s urgently triple the budget for a titanium dome!”.
But let’s try it! The problem? Resources are finite. If you pour everything into one parameter, others shrink like a student before final exams. As in the classic tale of the fortress: you can build walls two meters thick, or you can dig a moat, or you can maintain a garrison. Do everything at once? Only if you have the bank account of Saudi Arabia. For everyone else, it is an inevitable choice of only one option.
Evolution explained the rule of balance long ago. Look at the peacock: the tail is glamorous, but it flies like a sack of potatoes. The peacock invested its “evolutionary points” in marketing rather than in the R&D of migratory aviation. Or the ostrich: it gave up fighter-jet wings, but in exchange, it runs like a Formula 1 car. To each their own, but none of them tried to be Batman and Superman simultaneously—it’s too expensive.
Now let’s move from the savannah to the modern world. Take, for example, government structures that love to “play it safe.” In the pursuit of total security and control, they create cumbersome laws and regulations, turning life into a bureaucratic hell. The result? The economy becomes “heavier,” less agile, and the citizens become unhappy. All resources go toward fighting imaginary and rarely occurring risks, while startups flee to neighboring jurisdictions where they are allowed to make mistakes—and grow.
It’s the same song in business. Companies that are afraid to take risks and spend all their strength and money on insurance and re-insurance almost never become market leaders. They are overtaken by those who know how to take reasonable risks and understand that it’s impossible to prepare for everything at once. Want absolute server uptime? Pour money into redundancy, like into a “breakthrough” NFT in the winter of 2021. But be prepared that nothing will be left for UX, marketing, and salaries.
While you are building a bunker for a zombie apocalypse, your competitors are quietly conquering the market. And if the apocalypse does happen, it might look quite different from what you expected. And to hell with it—let the zombies worry now about how to deal with entrepreneurs who are used to taking risks and adapting faster than anyone else!
Of course, you cannot “ignore risks.” Calculating and considering them is very important. But do not become slaves to a single nightmare. The paradox: the more you cling to the “worst-case” scenario, the closer the “second-worst” scenario sails in—the one for which there was neither time nor nerves. The main thing is to remember the balance. Preparing for the worst-case scenario is useful and perhaps even necessary, but if you bet only on that, there is a great chance you will miss a mass of opportunities and be left with nothing. Life, economics, evolution—these are all games with limited resources. Success awaits those who understand that it is impossible to be ready for absolutely everything.
So there’s no need to wear a foil helmet; it’s better to check the weather, choose a moderate sunscreen, and go ahead—start building. Yes, you might get splashed by the first puddle. But the alternative is living in a spacesuit, where you can’t even drink coffee. And if a meteorite does happen to fall tomorrow… at least we lived the day without extra titanium on our heads.
