In a recent blog article, Carl Richards described risk as what is left over once someone thinks he has thought of everything.

Another way to put it is to describe it as uncertainty. What the next moment will bring cannot be known.

The difference between both is that if someone believes he has thought of everything he may start to believe that everything is under control. Or that he has found a way to bring all the odds under his control.

The desire to know is a force that needs to be considered. It regularly impacts our behavior as well as what we tell ourselves about the world, others, and ourselves.

It’s a force that drives us to remove the sense of not knowing from our lives. It’s useful as it serves us in every effort to make meaning. But what it also does is become active when past experiences and the beliefs we’ve established through them allow us to make meaning in an almost automatic way.

That’s how we make bets on the future using the past. And it’s also a situation in which we believe to have thought of everything.

When risk or luck appears and tells us that we’ve not thought of everything, we can be shocked. But we can also find ourselves reminded that being prepared is what we do to have energy available for whatever change we are confronted with.