How do most people feel on their birthday?
It’s not great…
They feel like time is slipping away. Like the end is creeping closer. Like they’re running out of everything – youth, vigour, and opportunities to build the life they dream of.
And then one day, it gets even worse.
One day, you feel like you’re “over the hill”, the dreams are gone for good, and it’s simply a matter of managing the decline.
Pretty bleak right?
But this all happens because you’re tracking the wrong number.
The thing about age is, we have no control over it. A year is the same length for everyone, whether you’re Jeff Bezos, or in a jail cell. And although the number goes “up”, we also intuitively understand that it’s a count “down” to the destination that awaits us all.
But what if there was a different number we could track our life by?
One that not only we control – but which brings us closer to our dreams each year, rather than making them slip away?
There is.
And it’s “risks taken”.
Success in most things (certainly in business) is simply a numbers game, where the number in question is simply the number of “risks” or “moves” you’ve made in your life. It’s very similar to gambling, whereby the more times you play, the more likely you are to win. Only unlike gambling, you can’t run out of money.
When we understand this, we can see that people “age” at extremely different rates.
A 24 year old with two failed companies under their belt is far “older” than a 50 year old who’s never taken a meaningful risk in their life. And because of this, the 24 year old is far closer to success, because they’re racing toward that magical number where the dice fall in their favour, and success just “happens”.
I noticed this vividly when I read Matthew McCounaghey’s memoir, Green Lights. Even before he became a movie star, he’d lived a phenomenal life, trying and experiencing all sorts of crazy things – so much so that I thought “damn, when he was 22 he’d lived more than me at 38!”.
Suddenly his becoming a movie star didn’t seem “lucky”. It seemed inevitable. It was only a matter of time, the number of moves he was making.
So I think we should stop celebrating our biological age, and start celebrating our “risk age” instead.
Imagine what it would be like if you threw a party not when your birthday rolled around, but instead every time you clocked up 10 meaningful “risks”.
It might take you a decade to do this.
Or it might take you a couple of months.
But either way, THAT is something to celebrate. And instead of feeling like you’re slowing down, you’ll feel like you’re speeding up.
(OK, everyone will also look at you like you’re a total weirdo, but hey, that’s something you’re gonna have to accept too if you want to carve your own path).
Age may be “just a number”.
But risks sure as hell are not. They’re a measure of the fullness and abundance with which you’re prepared to live.
And if you’re into that kinda thing… they’ll be a measure of your bank balance soon enough as well.
