Americans Are More Comfortable With Uncertainty aka the Black Swan
A definite ‘yes’ comes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of The Black Swan, to the Wired magazine’s question: Is one of the strengths of the American system that, relatively speaking, it’s more comfortable with uncertainty?
Taleb says, “People here aren’t afraid of failure. They’re willing to trade the possibility of failure for the chance at a big upside. No other country is willing to do this. What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure.”
Just a week ago, I asked Nikesh Arora, the guy behind Google’s European operations, what the top three major differences are between Google’s American vs. European experiences. His answer did not come as a surprise. One of the top three is that Europeans tend to avoid risk taking, i.e. dodge dealing with the unpredictable and taking in failure. Taleb’s view on Americans’ risk tolerance is very much in line with Nikesh Arora’s conclusion.
And if I go back with a few centuries to one of my favourite poets, John Keats, it is easy to connect Keats’ term of “negative capability” with risk tolerance. Keats said that a Man of Achievement is able to tackle unforeseeable events, and stay in them for a prolonged period. “at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”
Obviously, Keats primarily talks about literature, but not only that. I believe any big success comes with the ability of going through long phases of lurking black swans and wonderful multipotential future scenarios - in business, too.
So I am very glad that from mid June me and my husband, biotech geek blogger Attila Csordas are flying from Budapest, Hungary to start a new life in New Orleans, and see how our future is shaped by us and shaping us in the brand new and brand brave world where failure and randomness are more built into the everydays. Even if it means leaving all behind, not just our family and friends, but even fantastic inland job opportunities.
So countdown, pack, land, move into action, and snap to it. Oh, and maybe open a New Orleans blog?