Can't Make an Omelet

Without Breaking a Few Legs?

I can’t make an omelet in any case, because I can’t cook.

This will be telling: I am old enough not only to remember when pantyhose were a normal thing to wear but also when they came in an egg. I myself have worn pantyhose that came out of an egg.

A true story: When I arrived to my first day of work at my first real job—not babysitting for pocket money, but like with a W2—I was told to change because I was wearing a dress without pantyhose. No bare legs allowed. Fortunately the store I worked at sold pantyhose (in a plastic egg) so I bought some and put them on in the employee bathroom instead of having to go all the way home.

Looking back it feels really weird that there was about a ten-year period in my life where I had to wear tights and pantyhose that came packaged in a plastic egg as some kind of marketing gimmick and now they’re just sold in normal packaging. And also that they were required for women to wear in some situations and now they’re required nowhere and most people would not be caught dead wearing them. Not that I wear pantyhose, but sometimes I wear tights. 

It was the weird rabbit-slash-zombie holiday last weekend, I guess that has me thinking about plastic eggs, and regular eggs, and also being made to wear hosiery for church. Don’t get me started on that bizarre and now obsolete undergarment, the slip. You’ve come a long way baby.

Also don’t get me started on cigarettes made especially for women, another thing from those dark times.

Anyway today’s Shelf Life is all about risk, which has nothing to do with the above preamble, unless you consider going out without hose or a slip is risky business, which no one does. 

I like thinking about (and, hence, talking about) risk, risk-taking, risk mitigation, risk tolerance, risk-assessment strategies, and also how late in life the prefrontal cortex of the human brain finishes development (around twenty-five years old!) and the role that plays in risk assessment at different life stages. But all that’s not what you come here for.

Risk, for the intents and purposes of this article, means the possibility of something bad happening. Someone takes a risk when they engage in an activity that has the possibility of a bad outcome.

Risk is relevant to Shelf Life because anytime you engage in a creative activity you take a risk. Here are some of the risks inherent in creative activities:

• You may devote your time and energy to something that ultimately does not return value.

• Creativity requires personal vulnerability; you expose yourself to criticism from others.

• You may view the output of your creative endeavor as a failure (different and separate from bullet one) and experience emotional distress.

I’ll go ahead and say I’m not a fan of the sentiment, “There’s nothing to lose.” There’s always something to lose, even if it’s only time (but it’s rarely ever only time). I’ve been guilty of telling people, “Go ahead and apply for the job, why not, what do you have to lose?” But in reality:

• You may lose the time you spent revising your resume, drafting a cover letter, and filling the application.

• You open yourself to the possibility of rejection, which takes an emotional toll.

Likewise, people will say, “Well, write a novel if you think you want to, what do you have to lose?” This is because writing requires little to no upfront investment of money to start. You only need a piece of paper and a pencil, or the computer you already have and a word processor. What do you have to lose? You could lose a whole lot of time, first of all. Writing (fiction and otherwise) is rife with risk. You may:

• Begin writing and not complete the work, thus losing any effort committed to the project.

• Complete the work but feel unsatisfied with it, and give up on taking it further.

• Complete the work and seek editorial feedback, and receive harsh criticism.

• Complete the work and devote time to revision, only to find no interested agents.

• Complete the work and revise it and sign with an agent, only to find no interested publisher.

• Self publish your completed work but find no audience.

So why would you ever even do it then? Well: Here’s a sentiment of which I am a big fan: “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

In my career I’ve worked at organizations with different levels of risk aversion and I have found it challenging and frustrating to work under leaders who are risk averse, or at least risk-averse to a degree that I don’t feel like is reasonable in business. These leaders will come to you and want you to

• Do more work with fewer people.

• Complete work on shorter timelines.

• Lower costs.

• Find new revenue streams.

And you can do all these things, but not without taking risks. If you want a change to the status quo, you have to do something different; something you are not already doing. That’s always going to incur risk. Some changes might incur more risk or less risk but there’s always going to be some risk. You can research and consider all you want but until you actually do something different and admit the risk, there’s no possibility for change.

Let me give you a scenario from publishing. It’s like a golden oldie because I feel like I’ve been through the same thing with many companies. Problem: The company leadership want to find a way to decrease production costs. They’ll inevitably choose a budget line item to focus on (or ask me to focus on): How can we cut costs for this service? Let’s say copyediting (but I’ve also been issued the same challenge with page composition, printing, shipping, warehousing, publications staff, et cetera).

Okay, well, we could stop copyediting altogether. We could just cross this line item right off the budget and stop doing this. Publishers in a lot of spaces are there already. This is most complete and fastest way to save money on copyediting: Simply do not do that thing that’s costing money. This is the scorched-earth approach. The risk with this strategy is the editorial quality of your publications goes down, likely to a degree that is noticeable by readers. Over time, your publishing company will become known for putting out shoddy work and you will attract fewer authors and sell fewer publications.

But we don’t have to go that extreme. We can automate the copyediting. Offload the work through, essentially, machine learning. This isn’t as complete a cost savings as the first suggestion, because we either need to create the editing algorithm or secure use of an existing one (software as a service). Editorial quality will still drop, because machine-driven copyediting, as sophisticated as it has become, is highly rules-based and will not provide the same editorial quality as a human being, even a moderately skilled one.

I like to use the example of N (the full set) and n (the subsets) in a population cohort study, because you can’t simply tell the machine that N equals the largest number in the text or figure—sometimes N is the full set after disqualifications, for instance: Out of a pool of 10,000 patients, we selected 1,000 as our pool of N and then randomly assigned them to three arms: n = 300 getting treatment A, n = 300 getting treatment B, and n = 400 getting placebo. It is really freaking hard to get a computer to look at this in context and determine which set (n) is the full set (N) whereas a person with no other training than having read this paragraph can figure it out very quickly.

Leadership might still see that as too risky, so the next step is to suggest outsourcing to a vendor to manage copyediting, which is cheaper than maintaining a roster of freelancers who are organized by staff, which is still cheaper than having copyeditors on staff. But you can go down the list of these less- and less-risky options and leadership says, “No, still too risky for us” until you eventually realize they still want to copyedit everything, and they still want it done by a human, and they still want that human on staff—that is, they don’t want to change any of the parameters—they just want it cheaper somehow. They want to save money but they don’t want to incur any risk.

What I have found refreshing is working for leaders who understand that risk is inherent to growth and we need to manage risk responsibly but that doesn’t mean we don’t incur any.

Put another way: In order to grow and succeed, we have to try new things and we have to accept that some of those things will fail. Not everything we try is going to pan out. The only way to make sure you never fail at an endeavor is to never undertake any. 

I am a perfectionist; I don’t know whether I was born one or was made one. Nature, nurture, or both. I dislike not being good at something and that feeling encourages me to give up on things if I don’t become good at them very quickly. I have found it helps me tolerate the risk of trying something new to remind myself: Some of these attempts will fail. There’s no reality in which every attempt succeeds. 

A long time ago I interviewed for a job I was super excited about and ended up not getting the position. Someone comforted me by saying, “In life you don’t get the job a lot more times than you get the job.” I’ve always remembered that and now I counsel others (and myself) regarding job applications: Since, in life, you will not get the job more times than you get the job, you might as well get some of those times you do not get the job out of the way.”

All this is to say, this is how I manage my risk aversion with creative endeavors. When something gets a rejection or doesn’t turn out like I hoped it would, that’s not as exciting as a success but I know I have taken an inevitable failure out of the way of a future success.

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