The capacity to take risk is one of the biggest enablers of reaching your full potential and so we want to create a space where risk-takers can come together to talk about how they’ve developed their capacity for risk taking.
April L.c. Davis
I was born into the business of entrepreneurship, which has shaped my journey as a risk-taker—literally. My parents, Charles and Freddie Cowans, co-founded C & L Bus Repair Service in the 1990s, and the charter bus industry has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. My father left his job as a mechanic at AmeriCoach Tours in Memphis, TN, and my mother transitioned from her career in banking to pursue a dream they believed in wholeheartedly. Their courage to step into the unknown laid the foundation for what would become our family’s legacy. Watching them take such a bold leap of faith shaped my understanding of entrepreneurship and planted the seeds for my own journey as a risk-taker. Read more>>
Ashton Bray
I think every entrepreneur has to have a certain level of comfort with risk. After all, starting a business is inherently risky! But for me, it’s not about being reckless; it’s about calculated risk-taking.
The first big risk I ever took was moving to NYC right out of college. I had never been there in my whole 24 years of life, I had no friends or family there, yet I landed a job as a software engineer on Wall Street and knew it would create numerous opportunities for me. The second risk I took was quitting that job after 8 weeks, realizing it wasn’t what I was passionate about and I didn’t feel like a human being. It was a scary decision, but I knew I had to make a change. I spent the next 2.5 months perfecting the art of interviewing, which landed me at my dream job working at a Tech Startup. Read more>>
Gedalia Schorsch
How did I develop my ability to take risks? The short answer is practice. But the reality is that I enjoy taking risks and I think there’s a lot to learn from the process of taking risks.
I think risk often gets a bad rap and I see risk as an opportunity. And I also believe that my ability to take risks comes from many years of practice taking different kinds of risks. when I was younger, for example,I would climb everything, from playgrounds, to fences, to houses, to trees, and many many times people would really and truly freak out and lose their ever-loving-minds when they would see me in action. As an adult I practice parkour and gymnastics, run a woodworking business, and attempt to raise a child, managing the different kinds of risk that come up in different ways. Read more>>
Taylor Davis
My ability to take risks has really developed through learning and experience. I’ve always been grounded in the principles of finance, which emphasize understanding risk and reward. But beyond financial risks; I also consider risks in terms of life choices. I started small, taking calculated risks like leaving my first corporate job to go back to grad school for my MBA then later a bit larger with leaving investment banking to launch a tech startup. Those moves were risky, but they were informed by the support I have around me, the experiences I’ve gained, and the knowledge that I can always pivot back to a career path if needed. It’s about weighing the upside and downside and making decisions that help me grow both personally and professionally. Read more>>
Mustafa Kara Ali
Developing my ability to take risks as a photographer has resulted from years of working in challenging environments and dealing with daily dangers. With each new experience, I learned something new. Initially, I felt fear of the unknown, but over time, I became more aware of how to manage that fear and turn it into vigilance that helps me make the right decisions. Read more>>
Angel Padulo
I believe in order to live life to the fullest you have to be willing to take risks. Life is full of amazing opportunities, as well as incredible difficulties. I have learned the most from my failures, not my successes and that is what allows me to take risks. If you want something, you have to be willing to work hard to get it even if that means failing repeatedly. I took a big risk in my younger years and I never looked back. Once you take the leap anything is possible. Just go for it! Read more>>
Joey Cole
My ability to take risks developed through both necessity and mindset. Several years ago, I found myself driving out of town with my daughter to attend a concert. We spent money on gas, booked a hotel, and bought concert tickets only to realize that many fans who couldn’t travel were missing out on this live experience. At the same time, I noticed that artists weren’t fairly compensated for their music, and concerts weren’t accessible to a wider audience. This became the spark for the idea that eventually turned into the OUTLET APP. Read more>>
Gabrielle Piskorz
We often heard the phrase “risk vs. reward,” but I’ve never connected with the idea that every risk has to end in some type of reward. For me, risk doesn’t need a transactional outcome to justify it. Instead, I’ve come to view risk as an experience in itself—a way to step into the unknown, embrace uncertainty, and learn, regardless of the outcome. Read more>>
Omisha Chaitanya
It takes years to develop your skills enough to trust them when unchartered territories in your personal creative journey cross your path. The way to develop those skills is to keep working at them. I have spent hours on end listening to music I love and recreating them in digital audio workstations, recreating the instrumentations via MIDI sequencing, emulating the reverb and delay chains on analog hardware at the recording studio I work at, studying the patterns, transitions, and fills that keep the arrangement interesting with each instrument complimenting the other, and so much more. In addition to this practice, I find that in every artistic project I’ve worked on, there has always been certain questions that have arisen in the process of creating. Read more>>
Melissa Champion
Honestly I think that my ability to take risk came from necessity. About 3 years ago I had a financial crisis that I am still recovering from. Housing failure costs, and medical costs tumbled down in such force all at once, that I was concerned I wouldn’t get out from under them.
At that point, I began taking any additional job in addition to teaching that I could find, and in that time of necessity, I began to realize I could try multiple things to create different outcomes. While it has been somewhat of an uphill battle, strengths that I didn’t know that I had have emerged. One of those is a larger capacity to take risks. Read more>>
Naii Vegas
Taking risks has been a part of my journey from the very beginning. Leaving Venezuela in 2018 and starting over in Colombia taught me to embrace uncertainty and adapt quickly to new environments. During those 3 years, I traveled the world, learning from different cultures and experiences, which gave me a broader perspective and the courage to face the unknown. Read more>>
Jimmy Monterroso
My ability to take risks developed through a combination of painful mistakes, reflection, and the realization that risk is an essential part of progress. Early on, I learned that avoiding risks out of fear was far more dangerous than embracing them with thoughtful preparation. The most significant growth in my life has always come from facing challenges head-on, systematically learning from them, and evolving. Read more>>
Izzy Terzo
Taking a risk is taking a chance on yourself. Risk is Hope, Determination, and Believing in your ability to succeed past said “risks”. To succeed in risk is to operate without fear. As an individual I am able to differentiate fearful associations that follow along with the word “risk”. I feel that we live in an environment where everything feels as if it’s a risk. Everything is so public the privacy of our progress no longer exists if you have social media. To live in fear & risk is to believe that you lack. I developed my ability to take a chance on myself because I don’t have negative associations with the act of risk. Mindset is everything. Read more>>
Roxxy Haze
My ability to take risks was heavily influenced by my father. He instilled in me the importance of always trying, no matter how uncertain the outcome. My dad was a college professor, but he also had a passion for acting. He wrote, produced, and directed his own plays, and pursued acting later in life. Watching him take those bold steps and reinvent himself showed me the value of stepping outside your comfort zone and following your passions. His encouragement and example have always been a driving force in my willingness to take risks and try new things. Read more>>
