The common phrase “risk/reward” almost exclusively stampedes out of the speaker’s mouth with zero pause between the two words, like a German compound word (Schadenfreude).
For most of my days, specifically my employed days, I’ve interpreted risk-reward less as a reference to classifying investments or the film about women on Wall Street and more as a buzzier version of designating an idea as “not worth it”. As in “the risk-reward of dressing up the intern in a bear suit for the all-hands meeting isn’t worth it. The point I’m after here is that its use almost always carries a negative bias when it really shouldn’t, given proper attention to the hyphen.
Investments take their time to play out. Between the risk and the reward, there’s a period of waiting. In my experience, this is where you most need to act when investing in your new endeavor. Once you take a position, a risk, on a new endeavor or to put an end to a previously held position, you are in a new position of accountability. “Wait and see” will rarely be the move and in my case, it hasn’t been. I wanted to make a change in my life because my sons were on the way and I saw in my wife that she would have my back no matter what and I needed to become the person that would make things happen for them and for myself.
This past year has taught me that what happens when you take a new position: the breathless flurry of planning and execution, side-gig evenings and foregone comforts (bourbon, Netflix, kicking it old school), in the breadth of a hyphen between the words risk and reward is the unsung hero of the phrase. It turns the whole thing into a question of how to build yourself a parachute after you leap.
Now I am looking for new rewards worth the risk and the hyphen, which in my mind stands for initiative. Risknitiative. I made a terrible new German compound word just to celebrate. You heard it here first.