Sam Parr describes a mental exercise called "looking at the downside": visualize your worst-case scenario with eyes closed, feel the fear, then realize anything better is an upside. He pairs this with concrete protection: save six months of expenses, define your absolute lowest acceptable outcome like homelessness, and build fallbacks like a side gig or recruiter contacts at IBM and Target.
Chapters
The last thing that I do, this is an exercise. I thought I— this was unique to me. It's not. So I used to do this years ago and I still do it to this day. And it turns out there's a name to it. It's— some people call it a negative, a negative thought exercise. I call it looking at the downside. And so what I like to do in order to control my emotions, because the thing with controlling your emotions is you have to control the up and the down, because when you start a company or when you start anything, typically you have a fair bit of highs and the highs are probably as good feeling as you, as you think. Or maybe even a little bit less than you think. Um, but the downs are typically way worse than you can imagine. It's really hard to control the downs because when you start anything, um, controlling the down is the hard part. And most people are shocked at how low you can feel when you're starting something, even when things appear to be going well. And so what I like to do is I like to think in my mind, I'll close my eyes. I do this a lot, a lot of times in the morning. I'll do it at night as well. As I close my eyes and I think, what's the worst possible outcome right now? And so it could be I get sick, my family gets sick, I'm gonna die. And I visualize what, what that feels like and If you do it for long enough with your eyes closed, after about 5 or 10 minutes, you can really feel what that feels like. And then I do two things. I say to myself, all right, that is the worst that can happen. I just experienced it. Anything else that happens today, it is only upside. And it really makes you have a lot of gratitude and appreciate that, that hasn't actually happened. And the second thing that I like to do with this exercise is, and this relates particularly to starting a company or getting a job or moving somewhere else that's new and just starting your life, is I try to protect the downside. So for example, if you are going to start a company, you can ask yourself, well, in order to start this business, I need a little bit of cash. And so you have to be very specific. You have to say, how much cash do I need? Well, right now I'm spending $3,000 a month. How much, how many months saved do I need in order to feel good about this? And so let's say we come up with the number 6. That means I need 6 times $3,000. I need $18,000 in savings. I'm going to go out and get that $18,000. Okay, I've got that $18,000. What else is the worst case scenario here? What's the downside here? Well, I could spend all my money and my business goes under. Now, do I want to be homeless? No, I'm not willing to accept being homeless. Okay, so what's the next— so I have to protect myself from being homeless. How would I protect myself from being homeless? Well, I would probably get a job driving Uber because I have a car. Do I want to— am I willing to accept that? No, I'm not willing to accept that. Or maybe you are, and then that's the worst case scenario. But the one stage up could be maybe, well, I'll just get a white-collar job, um, at a huge corporation and I'll just be a cog in their big wheel and their machine. And it won't be fulfilling, it won't be glamorous, but it'll be a really good 9 to 5 with benefits, benefits. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go and make friends with recruiters at those companies right now, even though this isn't even coming close to hap— it's not happening yet. And so at least at this point, if something ever bad happens, I know that I have a connection at IBM or I have a connection at, um, Target headquarters, or I have a connection at Intuit or just the biggest companies in the world. And the likelihood that I can get a job there is relatively high. Am I willing to accept that that is the worst case scenario? Yes, I am willing to accept that. And so what I do is I go up the scale of like, all right, where's the lowest that I'm willing to accept. Now I'm going to lock that, that, that in as best as I can. So now anything that happens above this, I am happy and it is only upside. And so that's what I like to do to control my emotions when it comes to taking risk.
