Ronnen Harary argues the real risk is not following your curiosity. He calls it inverse risk: playing it safe means missing unpredictable upside. He and two friends couldn't have foreseen Paw Patrol's success, but committing to the venture changed everything.
I think that it's riskier not to bet on yourself. I think it's riskier to not go with what you're curious about in life, what you're passionate with in life. I think it's riskier to sometimes listen to other people and not to listen to yourself because at the end of the day, what's going to give you the most energy in your life and what's going to push you through and to run a business and to start a business You need so much fortitude to get through everything. If you're not curious about it, if you're not passionate, then you're not going to make it through. But if you are, your chances of actually getting success are greatly increased as a result of that. So it's kind of counterintuitive. The other thing with the inverse risk is that we can all game out the downside. We all know the bad side of what's going to happen, but you don't know what's going to happen once you start. It's beyond all our imaginations. And I think that the biggest thing is just making that decision. So for us, we made the decision, okay, we're going to actually go into business for ourselves. And I'm a huge believer in that. If you make that decision, the universe is going to meet you halfway, right? You can't write the story that 3 guys are going to go to Western and make a grass head and then 19 years later are going to make Paw Patrol. I can't write it. I can't write it. No one else can write it, right? The question is like, Do you want to miss out on the screenplay of your life? At the end of the day, it's like, it's riskier to not be true to yourself.
