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Woven into the DNA of every living creature, from the tiniest jellyfish to the largest sequoia, is the impulse to live. No creature desires to extinguish itself. Every organism is equipped with the ability to propagate itself in order to ensure the preservation of its genes. Death is to be avoided, and all the things that extend life are held at a premium. Every species must reproduce and then protect its offspring to ensure survival. The basic instinctual knowledge shared by all of creation is that life is preserved most effectively by avoiding danger. Because it is so essential to the perpetuation of life, self-preservation is the most basic and deeply rooted inhibitor of risk.

Were it not for the vital safety mechanism of self-preservation, the alternative, self-destruction, would be the norm. Thus, in writing about self-preservation as an inhibitor of risk, I don’t want to suggest that you purposely ward off self-preservation by becoming self-destructive. Rather, I want you to consider the degree to which self-preservation regulates your behavior. Ideally, you should be regulating this powerful instinct versus letting it regulate you. The simple fact is, if your life is governed solely by a desire to avoid danger, you will never be fully expressed as a risk-taker, and you will never be able to relish the risk. Life’s greatest risk moments demand that you be willing to relinquish at least a part of your self-preservation instinct, not in a self-destructive way, but in a self-ignoring, or even self-sacrificing way. Thus the fifth Right Risk principle is to put yourself on the line.

Self-Preservation

Stand on the edge of a cliff and tilt forward. What happens? Thankfully, the invisible hand of self-preservation rocks you back in place. Without this unseen protector, you would fall off the edge and die. But sometimes self-preservation holds you back, even in safe places. In these instances you are not graced by a benevolent protector, but enslaved under the strict control of a punitive headmaster. And headmaster is exactly the role that self-preservation often assumes. It can lord over your mind, directing every action toward protecting you from danger, until even the slightest risk is viewed as threatening. In the worst cases, the desire to preserve yourself becomes a straightjacket where every move must be painstakingly planned and predicted, and where caution and carefulness hold greater importance than unfettered enjoyment. This preservationist’s fear-based approach to life underpins such things as neurosis, paranoia, hypochondria, and agoraphobia. To them, life is something to be contained, not enjoyed.

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It is not that seasoned risk-takers discard self-preservation entirely. They are not suicidal. Rather, they refuse to be controlled by it. They recognize that enjoyment comes at a price, and the price is often the acknowledgment and acceptance of your own mortality. As high divers, for example, we were all well aware that every dive carried a real, albeit remote, chance of injury or death. Except for the 30 stitches I got after falling off the stage in Texas, I never got hurt. But many of my buddies did. I recall, for example, joining our troupe at Six Flags Over Georgia the day after one of our divers broke both of his ankles after performing a 60-foot high dive into an 8-foot pool. Everyone knew that taking these unusual risks was an unnatural act and that injury (or worse) came with the territory. The price of admission to all that temporary excitement was the miniscule chance of certain death. It is not that high divers are not afraid to die, it’s just that they are not afraid to live. They would rather risk the possibility of death while embracing life’s fullness of spirit than live a dispirited death-avoiding life.

Risking Your Reputation

A Right Risk often requires that you offer up your reputation as collateral against the potential rewards the risk might bring. When you do, the stakes become much higher and much more personal. With your reputation on the line, potential losses now include a piece of yourself. A good example of someone who took such a risk is Susan Estrich. As a young Phi Beta Kappa student at Wellesley, Estrich was known for her brilliance and skills of persuasion, qualities that later enabled her to be selected as the first woman president of the Harvard Law Review in 1976. Later, in 1981, these same qualities were instrumental in her being selected as a Harvard Law School professor.

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But amidst her growing public renown, she was grappling with a private anguish. During her years as a student, she had been violently raped. This event caused her to take a keen interest in U.S. rape laws, which she viewed as victimizing women by placing an unreasonable emphasis on the conduct of the female victim rather than the male perpetrator. Wanting to be instrumental in bringing about change on the issue, Estrich wrote an exhaustive critical treatment of U.S. rape laws for the prestigious Yale Law Journal. However, in what was considered a highly unorthodox move, Estrich put her reputation on the line by disclosing her own hardship. The article begins, “Eleven years ago, a man held an ice pick to my throat and said: ‘Push over, shut up, or I’ll kill you.’ I did what he said, but couldn’t stop crying. A hundred years later, I jumped out of the car as he drove away.”¹

By disclosing her rape, Estrich was taking the risk of opening up her life to the scrutiny and judgment of the academic establishment. It was entirely possible that Harvard could have viewed her efforts as too audacious and out of the traditional bounds of academic research that at the time frowned upon mixing doctrinal discourse with personal insight. Further adding to her risk, Estrich had written the article in the same year that she was up for tenure. But for Estrich, staking her reputation in order to influence unfair rape laws was a risk worth taking. Happily, not only was she awarded tenure, but the article won critical acclaim. Moreover, as a result of Estrich’s Right Risk, the attention in rape cases is now more balanced, with greater focus on the conduct of the alleged perpetrator.

Perhaps, like Susan Estrich, your risk involves putting your reputation at stake. Such risks are frightful—and certainly hard to relish—because we spend a lot of time trying to “preserve our reputations.” But in staking your reputation, you affirm your belief in yourself. You are essentially saying that you have enough confidence to trust your inclinations. In these instances, even if the outcome goes horribly wrong and your reputation is tarnished, you can at least live with the satisfaction that you didn’t betray yourself by living in a compromised way.

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Identity Destruction

Some of the most challenging risks are those that disrupt other people’s views of your identity. For example, converting from one religious denomination to another or switching political parties may be seen as highly offensive to the group you are leaving behind. In these instances, the group is likely to view your conversion as a rejection of an identity that they helped create, thus they take it personally. The more orthodox and close-knit the community you are leaving, the more of an outcast you are likely to become. By putting yourself on the line, you disrupt other people’s interpretation of who you should be and subject yourself to tremendous derision. You may be viewed as a maverick, rebel, or worse yet, traitor.

Such was the case, for example, in May 2001, when Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords stunningly announced that after serving 14 years in the House and 13 years in the Senate, he was leaving the Republican Party. Making the announcement even more shocking was that in becoming an Independent, Jeffords was shifting the balance of power from a Senate of 50 Republicans and 50 Democrats (with Vice President Cheney in the tie-breaker position for the GOP) to 49 Republicans and 50 Democrats, and one sympathetic Independent (Jeffords). Immediately the GOP labeled Jeffords a turncoat, with some members even going so far as to call him Benedict Arnold. But for Jeffords, upsetting the GOP was the Right Risk to take because it was an act of conscience. A long-time moderate, Jeffords had grown uncomfortable with the GOP’s increasingly conservative stance over issues like the environment, abortion rights, and education. Said Jeffords, “I knew that the unique circumstances of our time would allow one person to walk across the aisle and dramatically change the power structure of government, to again give moderation and balance to the system.”²

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Regardless of your political persuasion (I myself am a Republocrat), it is hard to deny that Jeffords staked his political career for what he believed to be right. As one Senatorial colleague of Jeffords noted, “He was willing to risk his career, friendships, and relationships in a great act of courage.” No matter how you view it, Jeffords clearly put himself on the line.

Like Jeffords, when you take the risk of putting forth a truer version of yourself, there will be plenty of people who will ridicule your new identity. But in discarding an identity that no longer suits you, you get to participate in your own evolution. To stifle this process, particularly to please others, would be to stunt your own maturation by going against the grain of nature.

Learning to Risk, Risking to Learn

Let’s face it, sometimes the only reason that you put yourself on the line is because someone shoved you over the line. Not all risks can be planned and well thought out. Not all risks are afforded the luxury of time. Sometimes we are forced to react quickly, relying on our instincts to see us through. For this reason, maintaining a regular risk regimen will increase your risk fitness so that when risks are thrust upon you, you will be better prepared to handle them intuitively. At the same time, just the act of taking risks prepares you for more risk. In going through an intense risk experience, you stretch your capability—and perhaps even your need—for more risk.

Take, for example, Josh Ryker. At 20 years old, like a lot of people his age, he is an extreme sports enthusiast. He has skydived, jumped off waterway bridges, dodged trees on a snowboard while racing at 45 mph, and even tried “reverse bungee jumping”—a bungee apparatus that yanks people upward instead of downward. As would be expected, Josh wears the war wounds of an extreme risk-taker. He has separated his shoulder, bloodied his nose, sprained both of his ankles, and had so many concussions that he lost count. His live-life-to-the-fullest verve may have been perfectly suited for—and perhaps influenced by—his biggest, and most harrowing risk experience: tackling a murderer.

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In 1998, Josh and his brother Jake were students at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon. Both were on the football team, both were Boy Scouts, and both were very different from Kip Kinkel, the loner student who had been kicked off the football team some time earlier. On May 21, 1998, Jake and Josh were eating in the school cafeteria when Kinkel came in wearing a trench coat and started shooting at everyone in sight. Jake Ryker was shot in the chest just as he stood up to warn his fellow students. He was shot again in the hand when he moved toward Kinkel. Then Josh, in an effort to stop the bloodshed, tackled and subdued Kinkel, with the help of a few teammates. When it was all over, two students lay dead and 25 more lay wounded. Without Josh’s heroics, the death toll would have assuredly been higher. Kinkel had lost his mind; he had shot and killed his parents the day before.

It is hard to tell whether Josh Ryker would be such an extreme risk-taker today had he not been through such a life-threatening (and risk-stretching) experience back in 1998. On the other hand, he may have been among the few people at the school who was temperamentally suited for such an act of bravery. Research suggests that our risk-taking behavior is shaped both by the temperament we are born with and the risk knowledge we acquire along the way. Yes, risk-taking, too, is a function of both nature and nurture.

The risk-taking aspect of our personality is evident even in infants, before any external influence would have had time to take effect. At as little as two weeks old, some toddlers have been found to have a greater need for stimuli, such as being more interested in a baby’s rattle, or more apt to follow a red ball with their eyes. The same children also appear more alert and less fearful.³ These inquisitive toddlers may well grow up into adults who drive in life’s fast lane, seeking out excitement. Yet, even for those less genetically predisposed to taking risks, the act of taking small risks seems to lead to wanting to take progressively larger ones. Once we learn to ride a bike, we eventually want to try riding with no hands. As we learn to successfully deal with risky situations, they stop being risky, and we desire even greater risk challenges.

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Regardless of whether the Ryker brothers were being influenced by nature or nurture, one thing is certain—each put his life on the line to save others. For their acts of heroism both Josh and Jake Ryker were awarded the Boy Scouts’ Honor Medal. Kip Kinkel was sentenced to 112 years without parole.

Self-Sacrifice: Chancing Death to Extend Life

Great deeds are wrought at great risk, and human advancement is very often a function of self-sacrifice. History is replete with examples that show that the best way to preserve life is often by chancing death. Sometimes the sole reason for putting yourself on the line is so others won’t have to. Consider, for example, one of the great scientific achievements of our age: the eradication of the polio virus.

In the 1950s, summers were a time of fear for parents across the country because of the dreaded disease of the young called infantile paralysis. Mothers would warn their kids to stay away from the local pond, a breeding ground for the deadly virus. Movie theaters would show public service reels with young children wearing leather and metal braces, or hospitalized children hooked up to scary looking contraptions called iron lungs. Ushers would then walk through the theater aisles collecting money for the March of Dimes, which was originally founded to gather research funds to combat the crippling disease. Most people knew of someone who had contracted the virus, and if they didn’t know someone personally, they at least knew about the most famous polio victim of all—President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In 1952, some 58,000 cases of polio were reported, 3,000 of them fatal. With the virus now reaching epidemic proportions, the race was on to develop a vaccine. Dr. Jonas Salk had spent years researching the virus and had developed a concoction that he thought just might work. His experimental vaccine was made from an inactive version of the virus, but without testing the vaccine on humans, Salk could not know for sure whether or not it would work. Convinced of the vaccine’s merit, Salk put himself on the line by injecting himself with the experimental vaccine. Riskier still, he also injected it into his wife . . . and three young sons. Fortunately the vaccine worked.

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Dr. Salk’s successful trial inspired others to try the vaccine. Then in 1954, the largest experimental vaccination in history was performed as roughly 1.8 million school children signed up to become “polio pioneers.” The vaccination was a resounding success. Before long, polio was virtually eradicated in every country where the vaccine was administered. Years later, when famed reporter Edward R. Murrow asked Salk who owned the vaccine’s patent, in true Right Risk fashion, Salk replied, “Well, the people, I would say,” adding, “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”⁴

Dr. Salk’s self-sacrifice, while notable, is by no means the only example of resisting the impulse of self-preservation in the service of scientific advancement. During the 18th century, another anti-preservationist, Scottish surgeon John Hunter, infected himself with gonorrhea to understand the disease better. Drawing on his unconventional methods of self-experimentation, Hunter published Treatise on the Venereal Disease, an important medical work during its day.⁵ (Not all acts of self-sacrifice turn out so well. During later experiments in which he tried to prove that syphilis and gonorrhea are different strains of the same disease, Hunter unintentionally gave himself syphilis with fatal results.⁶) In each of these instances, life was preserved at a macro level through self-sacrifice at a micro one by people who were willing to put themselves at risk.

What Makes a Hero?

It is easiest to relish our giant leap moments when we know that our motives for taking the risk are “all true.” The word right—as in Right Risk—implies correct, of pure motive, and full of integrity. In short, right equates with true. When our motives are “all true,” much of our intrinsic satisfaction stems from knowing that we are operating out of our uncompromised, and therefore “truest,” self.

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Altruism is the purest form of Right Risk, and no one exemplifies this as much as the hero. It is not just the fact that heroes put themselves on the line, it is their motives for doing so. Interestingly, heroes do not share characteristics commonly assigned to risk-takers. Unlike people who take decidedly Wrong Risks, like substance abusers (who also put themselves on the line), heroes are not especially susceptible to boredom, emotionally arousable, disinhibited, or pleasure-seeking. Unlike, say, rock climbers, heroes are not particularly driven by the physiological thrills associated with cheating death. Rather, heroes are driven by something other. One study of police officers and firefighters who had been decorated for bravery showed that heroes actually scored lower on one of the most studied dimensions of risk-taking: sensation-seeking. It appears that heroes are merely ordinary people who put themselves in extraordinary situations. Why? For reasons described as “pro social” (for the good of others) and altruistic.⁷ Perhaps this is why, following a heroic episode, heroes often humbly explain, “I just did what I thought was right.”

Putting Principle 5 into Practice

• What about yourself are you willing to put on the line in taking your big risk? Your reputation? Credibility? Identity? Life?
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• What about your identity is likely to change as a result of taking your big risk?
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• Draw a risk-taking continuum with self-preservation at one pole, and self-sacrifice at the other. Place a mark at the point on the continuum that best reflects your risk posture.

• Have you ever experienced a change of identity, such as a religious or a political conversion? If so, what about the experience was risky? Which people most resented your change of identity?
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• Think about your risk history. What have you learned about risk along the way? Were you born with your present risk disposition or was it molded by experience?
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• Make a list of people you think of as heroes. What risks did they take to gain hero status in your eyes? What characteristics do they have that you’d like to emulate? What, if anything, about your risk is altruistic?
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