How to Take a Risk on Yourself
By: Shaunta Grimes
Tags: Creativity, Self, Productivity, Work, Writing

I have trouble working in quiet, so I like to have the TV on for company and background noise. It can’t be anything too distracting though — nothing I’ll stop and just watch.

My two go-tos are Law and Order: SVU and the Food Network.

Today I’ve got Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives on and Guy Fieri‘s in a BBQ joint, interviewing an older man — maybe 60? — who owns the place. He’s got a wall full of trophies and ribbons.

He just said he told himself that as soon as he won tenth place in any catergory at any BBQ competition, he’d quit his day job and go all-in on the whole smoking meat thing.

I don’t know what his day job was. I don’t know if at some point in his life it was his dream. I don’t know if he was independently wealthy and quitting his job wasn’t as much of a risk as it sounds like.

But I do know that there’s a lesson in there about when to take a risk on yourself and how to go for it.

Here’s what I tell my students about sending out query letters to literary agents.

By standard is to send out ten. I’m looking for a ten percent positive response. That means one person has to respond the way I want them to. Positive response, in this case, means that someone asks me to send pages of my novel.

That’s it. One person writes me back and says this sounds good, send me 10 pages (or three chapters or the whole manuscript.)

Then I know that my query letter works. So I go all in. I send it that letter to everyone I can find who might be interested.

That’s hard to do — because what if my ten-agent sample wasn’t wide enough? What if someone sends me feedback that makes me revise my book and now everyone on the planet already has my query? What if that one person was a fluke or an outlier and no one else wants my manuscript?

Way back in my 20s, my criteria for going all in on writing was selling something, anything, for any amount of money. I wrote an article in the early 1990s about dog-friendly restaurants in Las Vegas. Someone paid me $10 for it. And that was it.

I couldn’t quit my day job then and I wouldn’t be able to for a long time, but from that moment on everything else I did was the side hustle that made writing possible.

Step #1: Identify Your Minimum Level of Success

It’s super easy to put off the actual need to change your life or take a risk by making your benchmark for going all in so high that you probably won’t ever get to it with out actually going all in.

That BBQ could have said that he’d quit his job and smoke meat full time or open a restaurant or whatever his path looked like — after he win a first place trophy at a prestigious competition.

I’ve talked to plenty of writers who never send their queries out to a wide variety of agents. And many more who’s criteria for going all in on writing is selling a manuscript to a publisher.

What is your minimum level of success? The thing that will let you know that if you go all in and take a risk on yourself, there’s at least a chance it will pay off?

Step #2: Identify What Your Risk Looks Like

In other words, what will you do, when you’ve crossed that minimum threshold?

The 60-year-old man on the Food Network’s risk looked like quitting his job.

I’ve had different risk moments in my writing career.

Going all out on submission, when I’ve had a ten percent positive response.

Spending the time, money, and energy on an MFA when I was accepted — even though my first books had just failed and my publisher declined to publish the third book in my trilogy.

Three years ago, it meant quitting my day job when Ninja Writers earned enough to replace my income for a year.

Step #3: Try This Thought Experiment

Imagine that you’re standing in front of two doors.

Behind one door is your life, the way it is today. Just the way it is. Good. Bad. Ugly. All of it.

Behind the other is change. Maybe a new job. A move across the country. College. Some creative pursuit. Something you want, but haven’t gone all in on.

In other words, behind the first door is everything you already know. Maybe you’re not happy with everything there, maybe there’s some dream or goal you’ve had that isn’t happening over there, but at least it’s the failure and rejection (and success) that you know.

And behind the other is risk.

Ask yourself what you need to know about door two before you open it. The bare minimum of information, not the positive, no-risk, know-everything amount of information.

Keep narrowing it down until you know the smallest amount of certainty you need before you open the door and go all in.

For BBQ man, it was a tenth place win.

For me, it was earning even a tiny bit of money, once.

What is it for you?