Risk is Part of Life

Give it the Old College Try

Amy E. Barr, The Lukeion Project

According to Grammarist, “give it the old college try,” an idiom that means “to put forth one’s very best effort to achieve something with a high risk of failure,” came not from colleges but from baseball. The old saying was framed around the notorious enthusiasm of an amateur athlete playing for his college team. The passion of a young energetic person attempting to impress his coach and peers might compel a player to catch an impossible fly ball or to risk his good looks by sliding face forward for a home-run.  

Which risks seem worth “the old college try” to you? Maybe you are so risk-adverse that you plan to stay in your basement to safely hide from life’s troubles. Perhaps you enjoy taking risks. You might consider parkour, exotic pets, adventurous foods, and walking a slack-line across vast chasms as worthwhile activities. Good for you! Take pictures for the rest of us.

Risk is unavoidable. Much of it can be the spice of life. Some of it is not so spicy. Most of us are middle-of-the-road when it comes to both risk-taking and our level of enthusiasm for those risks. The average human maintains comfort zones carefully but will occasionally venture outside of favored boundaries to attempt something new, difficult, or even risky (especially to impress).

If you’ve ever been accused of over-thinking, this means you spend quality brain energy vacillating and oscillating between the virtues of remaining in your comfort zone vs taking on challenges. Over-thinking things is what humans have done for centuries. Who or what decides the outcome of ventures tempted?

In Virgil’s Aeneid, Trojan refugees are led by rex Aeneas. They are driven by fate to undertake harrowing trials. The first half of the Aeneid follows Aeneas as he tries to get home to his new territory in Italy. Virgil made his chief character as a Roman parallel to Greek Homer’s Odysseus. Unlike swashbuckling Odysseus, Aeneas piloted past monsters, shipwrecks, and even the underworld to fulfill his patriotic duty to secure the safety of his fellow Trojans and then found the Roman race. Virgil weaves the Fata, the Fates, into his heroic account because despite risks and massive effort, Aeneas and his people will not fail. Aeneas’ success was set in stone by The Fates and by a poet retelling the tale 1000 years later.

Cicero said in his partly surviving work On Fate, “What I want to know therefore is … if there were no such word at all as fate, no such thing, no such force, and if either most things or all things took place by mere casual accident, would the course of events be different from what it is now? What is the point then of harping on fate, when everything can be explained by reference to nature and fortune without bringing fate in?”

Estimating probabilities of success and failure did not really get going until 1494 when Luca Pacioli, a monk in the Franciscan order, posed a puzzle that laid the foundations for modern risk calculation when inn 1654 the Pacioli Puzzle was finally solved. Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat had to get involved. Around this same time an Italian doctor, Girolamo Cardano, estimated the likelihood of different outcomes of rolling dice. Galileo would come to the same conclusions that Cardano did but didn’t make a fuss because he had his hands full with galaxies at the time.

For most human historical record, people viewed risk as something dictated either by fate or divine providence. Even Aeneas feared the fierce interference of an angry goddess intent on drowning what little remained of the Trojan nation, despite the dictates of The Fates (of whom there were three). The will of the Roman gods were not quite as powerful as destiny but often the lines were blurred for we poor mortals.  

What would you risk doing if you knew you could not fail? What if you believed that success—at whatever challenge is ahead—is something that fate has preordained? You would also have to acquiesce to the reverse: failure—at whatever challenge is ahead—is equally dictated by fate. This was the primary outlook of most ancient civilizations. Cicero (On Fate) detailed the problems we would face if we truly believed everything that happens is purely thanks to fate. He forecasts for such a person “the entire abolition of action from life.”

While Cicero continues to grapple with ideas of fate, providence, causation, and free-will, his worst forecast is for those who truly believe that fate is set: “If it is fated for you to recover from this illness, you will recover whether you call in a doctor or do not; similarly, if it is fated for you not to recover from this illness, you will not recover whether you call in a doctor or do not; and either your recovery or your non-recovery is fated; therefore there is no point in calling in a doctor.”

Aside from insurance companies and investment firms who now know how apply their best mathematical calculations to spread-sheets and apps to determine risks and possibilities in the form of fractions of standard deviations, most people still do their own personal calculations about how often they are ready to go all-in on something that seems risky, dangerous, or just labor intensive.

We modern souls are no further along than Cicero as he tries to calculate the role of fate, free-will, divine interference, or (as he says) “the unexplained swerve of atoms” as we navigate life, choose when and where to work, when to rest, and in figuring out what is “meant” to happen to us. Freewill resides in our own not knowing, either way. We wouldn’t want to see our fate nor that of our loved ones. We simply couldn’t bear the knowledge of our own destiny. So, the only logical alternative is to press on with all things as though we cannot and must not fail.

Cicero. De Fato. Trans. R. Rackham