The Resilient Mind - Become A Risk Taker - Earl Nightingale

Episode Date: October 15, 2023

Earl Nightingale was an American radio speaker and author, dealing mostly with the subjects of human character development, motivation, and meaningful existence. He was the voice during the early 1950s of Sky King, the hero of a radio adventure series, and was a WGN radio program host from 1950 to 1956.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to Become a Risk Taker with Earl Nightingale. Get access to the Mental Mastery Program by becoming a subscriber. Enjoy. Have you ever given much thought to the idea that the spoils in life go to the risk takers? If you'll give it some thought, I think you'll come up with the same solution I arrived at. A survey indicated that 98% of the men in the country are looking for security in their work. That is, they're mainly interested in losing themselves deep in the warm, nourishing viscera of some large corporation, which is fine.

I'm not knocking it. I'm just commenting on it. But these are not, as a rule, the risk takers. They're more the play it savers. And while they can have good and successful careers all their working lives, the chances are against they're hitting the big jackpot. Now, the reason I say this is because this sort of life as a rule does not encourage a man to do much more than he has to do. and he'll usually spend his free time, which comes to something like 72 hours a week when he's neither working nor sleeping, in pursuits not calculated to help him get ahead in the world.

Now, the man who risks his spare time writing a book, painting pictures, fiddling with inventions, continuing his education, is generally the one in this kind of milieu who will advance above his fellows. But the man who risks all of his time on a goal he wants to reach, on a dream in his heart, who stakes his livelihood and the livelihood of his family upon his own brains and the proper use of his time and tackles the world single-handed, here's the risk-taker to whom the spoils will generally accrue. Now, I'm not talking about the impractical dreamer and stargazer, I'm talking about the man of action who gets out and raises the dust in the world. He might take some king-sized pratt-falls and be snickered at by friends and relatives of a more conservative bent, but he'll usually make the grade if he stays with it and earn their admiration if not in.

before he's through. You know, one of the biggest factors in his favor is the size of the group he belongs to. According to the most reliable figures I can find, this risk taker belongs to only about 2% of the population. And since he's generally working on an idea that will in some way serve the big 98%, the odd swing rather favorably to his side. Additionally, a man on his own must think. He must devote more of his days to thinking. Conversely, the man with a good, steady job, who's familiar with his work and surroundings, can go along pretty well from day to day without doing any creative thinking at all. And, as I said, we have a tendency to do no more than we have to. Anybody who spends a good deal of his time thinking is going to come up with a good idea once in a while.

The law of averages is definitely on his side. And if you'll think about it a minute, you'll realize that he only needs a few, maybe only one really good idea, to make it. big. Now, the more you think about it and analyze it, the more it makes you think that what appears to be the risk taker really isn't nearly as big a risk taker as you might imagine. The cards are stacked pretty well for him from several important standpoints. But as I said in the beginning, the spoils definitely go to the risk taker. Life is full of hidden contradictions. One is that the man who thinks he's playing it safe really isn't. And the man who seems to be taking the greatest risks, considering the law of averages, is playing its safest.

People who do well in the world, being creative and willing to take a calculated risk, are people who manage to overcome the fear of laughter. Anytime you attempt anything in which you risk failure, you run the risk of having people laugh at you. A college professor worked for many years on an invention. He tramped all over New England trying to interest capital in his device for making the human voice travel along a wire. The people laughed at him. It was, of course, plumbed, idiotic, they said, to suppose that the human voice could be carried along a wire and heard for many miles or even for a single mile.

But our old friend and benefactor Alexander Graham Bell could not be laughed out of it, and every time we pick up the telephone, we salute the man who stayed on course despite the laughter. Millions of people laughing in derision could not hurt us an iota, but we stand in mortal terror of it. Men and women who can prove themselves heroes in great crises trembled before derision. It's a queer quirk of human nature. We probably develop as children. It has cost much. It's changed the history of the world. Sometimes the price of a laugh have meant the slamming of a door of fame and fortune, or even immortality.

Elias Howe invented the sewing machine, but it nearly rusted away before the American women stopped laughing about it and could be persuaded to make use of it. With their sewing done so quickly, they argued, what would they ever do with all their spare time? So a biographer paints a tragic picture, the man who had done more than any other delight in the work of women, was forced to borrow a suit of close on an occasion of a public appearance. Men are as bad as women when it comes to resisting new ideas. The typewriter had been a demonstrated

success for years before businessmen could be persuaded to buy it. How could anyone have letters to write, they argued, to justify the investment of $100 in a writing machine? Only when the Remington sold patent rights to the calligraph company and two groups of salesmen worked in competition

was the resistance finally broken down. Zerography faced the same kind of problem when it was first introduced, and other inventions have had similar battles. Here's an extract from a notebook of Robert Fulton who invented the steamship who changed the world from sail to steam on the oceans of the world. He wrote, As I had occasioned daily to pass to and from the shipyard where my boat was in progress,

I often loitered near the groups of strangers and heard various remarks as to the object of this new vehicle. The language was uniformly that of scorn, sneer, or ridicule. The loud laugh often rose at my expense. dry jest, the wise calculations of losses or expenditures, the dull repetition of Fulton's folly, never did a single encouraging remark, a bright hope, a warm wish cross my path. Never did a single encouraging remark, a bright hope, a warm wish cross my path. And that's about what you can expect when you try something new.

Emerson once commented that no one ever falls ill, but that passes by idly hope. that he will die and the same perversity and built-in envy cause people to think or hope that any new idea or plan that runs countered to established principle will fail. Speaking of Emerson, he also wrote, Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates and Jesus and Luther and Copernicus and Galileo and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh, to be great, is to be misunderstood. it. You know, we tend to forget that the greatest people, the greatest writers, the greatest teachers, were for the most part in violent disagreement with their times in the way things were being done. We seem to have become so flabby in our acceptance of anything, that we failed to do anything personally about what we see about it. Norman Cousins has written that the biggest issue of all in the years just ahead is not just the squandering of physical resources,

but the squandering of human resources. What constitutes failure? What does a person have to do or not do in order to fail? Herman Melville died in 1891. He wrote the book Moby Dick, the Whaling Epic, with its tremendous metaphysical concept of evil at the age of 30. The book was published in 1851, sold a few copies, and then was promptly forgotten except by the limited connoisseurs of creative writing.

Melville lived 40 years, beyond publication of Moby Dick. He considered himself and his book a failure, and from a published point of view, Melville was right. Of his other novels, Billy Budd remained unpublished for 40 years after his death, and like Moby Dick, has since become a literary classic. Today, sales of Melville's works run into the millions, but there is no retroactive compensation for the author's troubled soul or shoddy purse. So what is failure? Failure does not come to a person because he is not recognized by the multitudes during his lifetime or ever. Our success or failure has nothing to do with the opinions of others. It has only to do with

our own opinion of ourselves and what we're doing. The only person that can be called a failure is that person who tries to succeed at nothing. Success, as far as a person is concerned, does not lie in achievement. It lies in striving, reaching, attempting. Any person who decides upon a course of action he deems to be worthy of him and sets out to accomplish that goal, is a success right then and there. Therefore, failure consists not in failing to reach our goals, but rather in not establishing them. Failure consists of not trying, and certainly Melville and all the others who were not

recognized until long after their death were successful during their lives because of the fact that they strove all of their lives and gave to their work the best that was in them. And for every Melville that we read about, there have been millions of men in women equally successful, of whom we'll never hear, people who didn't write books or try to save the world, but who, in their own quiet way, in their own places, gave to what they had chosen the best that was in them. Melville must have known deep within himself when he finished the last page of Moby Dick that he had not failed, just as each of us knows how much of himself he's giving to what it's been given him, what he has chosen to do. People who play it too safe

take the greatest risks. Did you know that? In the long of the long time, he's given. In the long, In the long haul, the intelligent risk-takers develop the greatest security, is the wise person who learns the importance of risk-taking. During World War II, psychologist E. Paul Torrance made a study of United States Aces flying in the Pacific Theater of Operations. He reported that the most salient characteristic of the Ace was his risk-taking ability. Throughout his life, he had kept testing the limits of his abilities, and the life history of these men showed that they were highly resistant to accidents, and in combat they suffered

fewer casualties than pilots who were inclined to play it safe. Dr. Torrance said, living itself is a risky business. If we spent half as much time learning how to take risks as we spend avoiding them, we wouldn't have nearly so much to fear in life. In all walks of life, the most successful people are the risk takers. Now, by that I mean a risk believing in their own ideas, striking out toward their own goals, standing up for what they believe to be right. They take the risk of being different when they believe in something. Now, this has a tendency to make the going a little tougher for a while, but they almost always wind up ahead of the game eventually. Risk takers realize there's nothing wrong with an occasional failure. The play it

safer seem to think a failure means the end of the world. The risk takers are not foolhardy. Getting back to the World War II Aces for a moment, it was found that these men were very fussy about their airplanes, armament, and equipment. They were painstaking in preparation, highly disciplined in following instructions and what they had been taught. But in an encounter with the enemy, they would immediately take charge and go on their offense. The best defense is often a good offense. The best past defense in football is to rush the quarterback. When a storm comes up, ships in the harbor ahead for the raging open sea unless they're protected in slips. In the harbor, they could drag their anchors and wind up on the beach or the breakwater. So what appears to be

risk-taking is often the most intelligent course to follow. It leads to security, while what would appear to be the safest course of action can lead to disaster or simply nowhere. A young woman whose romance had gone on the rocks told her mother that she was never going to permit herself to fall in love again. You only get hurt, she said. And if you don't fall in love, her mother said, you don't live. It's another one of those risks the successful person is willing to take. Everyone runs risks, quite sizable risks every day of his life, risks he takes for granted or isn't even aware of. But when an unusual situation comes along that involves risk taking, how do you decide whether or not to go ahead? When a situation comes along that involves risk,

And you don't know whether to go ahead or hold back. Reassess your goals. What are you trying to accomplish? What are you working toward? Will taking this risk, if it works out successfully, help you toward your goals. There's nothing some people like to do better than they give advice. Unfortunately, a lot of advice that's dished out would have to be classified as useless information. If I had to pick a winner in the useless information department, it would probably be the advice that goes,

look before you leap. It is a good recommendation for swimmers and jumpers, but as far as life is concerned, it's impossible to do. We can look backward. We can see the results of our past actions and learn from them, but we can't look into the future. In living, we can guess or try to predict what the future will hold, but we really can't look before we leap.

As a result of this, most people simply don't leap at all. But it's a wonderful and little-known fact that for those who dare to attempt a new and seemingly difficult leap, the results are often surprisingly successful and rewarding. Now this is something that needs some explaining and no little qualification. The leap we take should be in line with two important criteria. One, it should be towards something we want with all our heart. And two, it should be in a field in which we have a good background of experience, or at least in an area related to our past experience. Let me give you some examples. Lindberg took the big leap when he flew

non-stop across the Atlantic, the first one to ever do so. But behind him were years of flying experience, including flying the mail in all kinds of weather with virtually no navigation leads. He couldn't see into the future as far as his successor failure was concerned, with failure probably meaning his death, but he was well prepared for the leap, and it made him rich and famous. Columbus did the same thing. He wanted to do something that had never been tried before. He believed it could be done, and he was a highly skilled as sailor navigator, and he had the best chips then available for the journey. All human progress is the result of this kind of thing, and on a much smaller scale, the same principle can be applied to our lives.

If there's something you want very much to do, if you know it's right and if you're prepared to try it, the chances are excellent that you'll meet with surprising success. And after you've taken the big jump, you'll probably wonder why you waited so long. Of course, there's always the risk of failure. Lindberg could have been killed. Columbus's little fleet could have met with a disaster. Einstein might have been wrong. Washington might have been defeated and hanged along with all the signers of the Declaration of Independence by the British. But the fact is, they were not.

It brings to mind again the great lines spoken by Thucydides in his funeral speech for Pericles. The secret of happiness is freedom. And the secret of freedom, courage. You'll never get elected unless you are. expose yourself to defeat. You'll never make it to second base if you try to keep one foot on first. You will never achieve the dream in your heart unless you take the big jump and are willing to risk everything, even failure, on the attempt. If it's what's right for you and you've prepared yourself as best you can for the attempt, the chances are excellent that you meet with success.

As Lincoln put it, let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it. No, you can't look before you leap, but you can leap. Dr. Joyce Brothers has some good advice for the fearful. She points out that everyone is familiar with fear. Normal fear protects us and provides a warning signal indicating the presence of danger. A totally fearless person is probably not too intelligent and can look forward to a very short life. But when fear is inappropriate, it can stand in the way of progress and success. It can destroy love, create failure on the job, and interfere with our ability to relate well to others. Innovation and creativity involve risk, Dr. Brothers, goes on to say.

The person who's afraid to take chances who's afraid of failure is standing in the way of his progress. In fact, an emotionally healthy person needs challenge in life. Studies show that people who are cautious in the extreme, who are afraid to take risks even when the odds are in their favor, tend to be afraid of life itself, which of course is also a gamble. Such persons are not likely to succeed in business or anything else. So Dr. Brothers suggest that such people practice failure. How liberating it would be for the average person to be able to walk into a room, trip over a waste basket, have all the people in the office laugh,

and then be able to laugh with them. In fact, Dr. Brothers suggest that fearful people deliberately do such things to discover that an occasional failure is no disgrace, but rather a perfectly normal part of living. I remember when I was just starting out in radio, I managed to get the part of Sky King, the lead in the famous children's radio program of that name, and I'd often be asked to make public appearances for school children. One day I flew up to Michigan to greet and sign autographs for several hundred children allowed out of school for the event. I flew there in a small two-seater airplane.

I was dressed in my cowboy costume, from the hat to the cowboy boots, gun belt, the works. As I was trying to climb out of the airplane cockpit in my unaccustomed costume, while the hundreds of children watched and waited nearby, I caught my heel on the cockpit combing and fell full length on the wing. Then I did a slow roll off the trailing edge of the wing to the ground. My guns fell out, my hat rolled away, and a death-like silence fell on the children. There was their hero, sprawled on the grass. He couldn't even get out of an airplane. While I picked up my guns put my hat back on and with a sheepish grin from ear to ear walk to the waiting children. We all had a good laugh about it and I signed the autographs and all went surprisingly well.

And as I flew back to Chicago, I thought about how often children fall and that they could easily empathize with me. Don't lose your sense of humor and remember that even though they may laugh, people are kinder and more forgiving than we generally give them credit for being. risks and prepfalls are a part of life. So is an occasional failure in other ways. Thank you for tuning into this episode. If you're enjoying the content, you can access exclusive material by becoming a subscriber.

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