I think that we are a risk-averse society. Eh? Where did that come from? Aren’t there heaps of risk-takers about? Extreme sportspeople, for example? OK, what percentage of our society are extreme sportspeople? I’m talking about the “mass of men” that “lead lives of quiet desperation.”

I’ve been speaking fairly regularly with Nigel Allan. Something that he speaks of every now and again is the aeronautical term “V1”. V1 is the go/no-go point of getting an aircraft off the ground. If you get to V1, you have the choice of getting yourself into the air or crashing. Doesn’t sound like much of a choice to me. The thing is that at that point, you have to be committed to getting off the ground, and you must have discarded all of the other options that you think may have been feasible.

So bring this back to every day life. How many ways do we avoid reaching V1?

Once upon a time, I was in a car with my Dad. When I pointed out that there was less traffic in the left (slow) lane and, based on my experience, the trip is faster, he said no, he wanted to stay in the middle lane to keep his options open. Have you ever held off accepting a job, because you had another couple of irons in the fire, and wanted to keep your options open? Held off making a decision between movies and a picnic because you weren’t sure about the weather?

What about these stock market “risk takers”? That is possibly the most extreme example of a lack of commitment in the world. When you’re one of the big players, you always keep your options open. You have exit strategies for any position, and if something looks like it’s going bad, you bug out. You have alarms that go off if it looks like a position is taking a hit, and you bail as soon as you can. You don’t hold on to a stock that looks like it’s going bad just because you like the company … there are no friends in the stock market. There is no long term commitment there to anything except the game.

People live together before they marry because they don’t know if they want to commit. They have pre-nuptial agreements when they do marry because they aren’t prepared to commit for life and/or they aren’t prepared to believe that their intended spouse is prepared to commit for life.

Commitments involve risk. They involve getting to V1, and I believe that it’s getting to V1 that we avoid. We put off committing to a course of action; we keep our options open. There is an inherent problem with that: with multiple options in mind, we have to juggle them and be aware of them. They cost us time and money. They cause us stress because they aren’t necessarily compatible. And when we finally get to a point where we have to make a decision, we’re not prepared for it. We’ve spent all of this time and energy in keeping options open, and we’re tired.

So let’s think about that pilot. She’s cruising down the runway, but by the time she got into the plane, she’d committed to a destination. By implication, she’d committed to taking off at V1. She’s looking for reasons why it would be unwise or unsafe to take off, but her destination is set. She’s not wondering whether she’s going to Tahiti or New York or whether she’s going to circle the airport a couple times, or maybe just taxi around for a couple of hours. She’s committed to her destination.

So here’s my advice, for what it’s worth. Commit! Mean it! Take the risk! Decide on the picnic, and risk the weather. Do yourself a favour and stop juggling all the options. If necessary, take a few minutes and write down pros and cons for the biggest few options before you decide, but commit to your destination well before you have to make a decision. Then start to breathe the air and smell the roses … you don’t have to be so stressed any more.