You Are What You Risk summary

Entrepreneur Mariéme Jamme doesn’t often use the word “risk.” Having survived a traumatic childhood in Senegal and France, where she was trafficked, she knows how it feels when the odds are against her. She also knows just how much hard work and good fortune go into achieving success.

For Mariéme, taking a risk is about having something to aim for and working as hard as she can to make it happen. Nowadays, her preferred term isn’t risk, but a word with more positive connotations: hope. 

In 1901, 63-year-old widow Annie Edson Taylor had one dream: to ride over Niagara Falls in a barrel. She wasn’t a thrill-seeker, though – she just needed cash, and the barrel stunt was a risky get-rich-quick scheme.

But why was she so comfortable with risk? Lots of factors were involved. Both her husband and her father had died suddenly, which taught her that life was fleeting. She’d previously been wealthy and had lost it all, so she didn’t fear the consequences of failure. And a recent stock market crash had left her with genuinely few options.

What type of risk-taker are you? Everyone’s unique, but it can still be useful to broadly categorize people. To that end, financial advisors use risk profiles to determine how much of someone’s investment should go into safer bonds versus riskier stocks.

The Risk Type Compass, developed by the UK-based Psychological Consultancy, places people on a compass with eight points. Each of these points is labeled with terms like “Wary” or “Prudent”; opposite those are the words “Adventurous” and “Carefree.” If people place toward the middle, their risk appetite is changeable.

During the first wave of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, New York City hospitals were especially badly hit. With personal protective equipment in short supply, emergency-room nurses were right in the danger zone.

How did the nurses respond? In pretty diverse ways, it turns out. Some resigned themselves to the risks and just carried on as best they could. Some sent their children to stay with friends. Others stayed apart from their families or devised elaborate decontamination routines once they got home. Some retired, while others actually came out of retirement to offer help.

October 2017 was a strange time in South Korea. US president Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un were engaging in an incredibly high-stakes war of words – and the city of Seoul was directly in the line of fire. But South Koreans themselves were thinking about something else: South Korean president Park Geun-hye, who had recently been removed from office for corruption. 

The former president was especially unpopular because of continuing fallout from a ferry disaster that had happened several years before. But as the threat of a nuclear war with their neighbors loomed, why was it this issue that enthralled the general public? 

Coss Marte was a millionaire at age 22. But he’d made his fortune selling drugs – and by 23, he was on his way to prison for seven years. There, the prison doctor told him that because of his obesity, he only had around five years to live.

So he got in shape. Once he’d done that, he helped his fellow prisoners do the same. After getting out of prison, he set up a gym. And when the pandemic hit, he deftly pivoted to online training sessions, which vastly expanded his reach.