The Mach 1 Experience: 6 Keys to Successful Risk-Taking

In the movie The Right Stuff, about the Mercury astronaut program, there’s a scene in which the test-pilot Chuck Yeager is attempting to break the sound barrier for the first time, and just before he reaches that illustrious Mach 1—roughly 750 mph—the plane starts shaking and shuddering violently and threatening to bust apart in midair.

But then at Mach 1, he breaks through the sound barrier, people on the ground hear the world’s first sonic boom, and Yeager’s jet suddenly goes into a perfectly smooth ride. He describes it by saying, “My grandma could be sitting up there sipping lemonade."

In any attempt at a breakthrough, there’s going to be a Mach 1 experience. There’s going to be shaking and shuddering before things smooth out, and it’s not opposed to the breakthrough, it’s part of it. But you’ve got to push past it if you want to reach the boom times.

There’s no risk without fear, but the psychologist Abraham Maslow, who coined the term self-actualization, believed that self-actualizing types are “those who make the growth choice instead of the fear choice—a dozen times a day.”

That’s a bar set pretty high, but embedded within the dangerous is the liberating, and within the fearful is the heroic. It’s only by taking risks that whatever passion and purpose is in you truly takes flight.

The science of immunization, in fact, is based on the wisdom that one way to strengthen the human body is to shake it up, to introduce a little chaos into the system for the sake of helping it evolve and adapt, grow stronger and more resilient. Risk-taking has a similar effect on the human psyche, so ask yourself what acts of boat-rocking you could introduce into your life right now that would have the effect of shaking you up and helping you evolve.

Toward that end, below are six key things to understand about risk-taking:

1) Risk-avoidance is normal. Step One of the hero’s journey is “The Call to Adventure,” but Step Two is “The Refusal of the Call.” We all have different thresholds for how much of this journey we’re inclined to take on, along with how much shaking and shuddering, but most people’s initial response to the call to live heroically is refusing to live heroically. It’s normal and natural.

In fact, the old brain that’s helped get us through the evolutionary maze comes equipped with a worry meter set somewhere near the middle of the spectrum. Too much of it would have been constraining, too little would have incited foolhardiness, but either way we’re wired to be cautious.

2) Risk is utterly relative. It’s whatever scares you. Whatever is capable of bring a little excitement into your life. One person may feel adventurous simply asking someone out on a date or wearing a hat with a feather in it, and another needs to be coked up on the kind of adrenaline rush that only comes from an activity in which the result of a mistake could be injury or death—big wave surfing, skiing down Mount Everest.

I was sitting around with a few friends one evening recently when one of them said, “You know what the problem is? We’re not outrageous enough.” When I asked him what he would do if he were to be outrageous, he thought for a moment, then reached up and swept his hair from middle-parted and slicked-back to side-parted with a cowlick dangling rakishly over his forehead—instantly transforming him from Richard to Ricardo, from PhD to matinee idol. “I’d come into work like this,” he said.

3) Start small. We tend to equate risk with big scary stuff like tossing ourselves out of airplanes, but risks much closer to home are every bit as capable of lighting our fires. Take your poems or jokes to open-mike night, join a theater company, be the first to make up after a quarrel, make love with your eyes open or the lights on; when someone asks how you are tell them how you really are. Sometimes the riskiest thing you can do is to simply sit for an hour a day and do your writing/painting/piano playing/business planning/_______.

4) Second-guess your own risk perceptions. This isn’t about overriding instinct and intuition, or making light of the fears and even traumas you’ve experienced that explain why you’re risk-averse, but about tempering your involuntary assumptions and wild imagination.

For example, it’s important to put the possibility of failure or mishap into perspective by posing a question that’s critical to your understanding of any risk: How likely is it? The Times of London once ran a story claiming that the number of Brits murdered by strangers had increased by a third in eight years, from 99 to 130. That’s certainly dismaying, but what the article failed to mention is that there are roughly 60 million Brits. Thus their chances of being killed by a stranger increased from .00016 percent to .00022 percent. Hardly reason to lock yourself in an underground bunker and stock up on canned soup and shotgun shells.

5) Put “protective frames” around risk. To improve the results of your risk-taking, and your tolerance for it, increase what Michael Apter in The Dangerous Edge calls your protective frames, mechanisms you put in place to convince yourself you can do it.

"Think of looking at a tiger in a cage,” he says. “Both the tiger and the cage are needed in order to experience excitement. The tiger without the cage would be frightening. The cage without the tiger would be boring. Both are necessary. In order to experience excitement, we need both the possibility of danger and something we believe will protect us from it."

This could be the psychological bubble provided by well-honed skills, advance preparation and rehearsal, proper equipment, a support network, a sense of confidence, and an emergency parachute. It could be rituals and routines that help ground you and keep you balanced while you do your highwire work—a regular writing schedule, a daily meditation practice, a cuppa coffee before and a jog in the park after your peak creative hours.

6) Say yes more often. The willingness to say yes to risk and take action is vital to the passionate life because it keeps you on your growing edge, trying new things, taking initiative, and leaning into life rather than backing away lobster-like into safe crannies. Where there’s action, there’s movement and energy, kinetic and catalytic force. And though movement isn’t necessarily progress any more than noise is necessarily music, it’s still movement, and for anyone stuck in the doldrums, it offers at least a breeze.

Try an experiment. For a period of time, say yes to everything. Accept all offers. Affirm other people. Go along with the plan. Practice acting on your passions and desires in a moment here and a moment there. Not as a five-year plan, but as a daily practice.

For more about Passion, see www.gregglevoy.com