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原文来自Morgan Houseld的博客。对于风险的讨论一般都流于学术，真正有指导意义的不多。Morgan的这一篇引用了Bezos的观点，同时加入了downside的保护，教你聪明的冒险。 Risk management starts with what Jeff Bezos calls the “regret minimization framework.” Project yourself to age 80, or age 90. “Looking back on your life, you want to minimize the number of regrets you have,” he says. 风险管理可以从杰夫.贝佐斯所谓的“后悔最小化框架”开始。将自己投射到80岁或90岁，“回顾你的一生，你希望尽量减少你的后悔，”他说。 A regret is different than a challenge, a mishap, a period of misery, or even a disaster. Most people can deal with all kinds of nonsense that hurts today but you may not regret tomorrow. A lot of what seems risky today you won’t even remember tomorrow. 后悔不同于挑战、不同于事故，不同于一段痛苦甚至是灾难。大多数人都可以处理今天看起来伤害了你但是明天你不会后悔的琐事。 很多今天看起来很危险的东西，明天你甚至都不会记得。 Once you frame risk as avoiding regret, the questions becomes, “Who cares what’s hard but I can recover from? Because that’s not what I’m worried about. I’m worried about, ‘What will I regret?’” 一旦你把风险定为避免后悔，问题就变成了，“谁在乎那些你能恢复过来的困难？因为那不是我所担心的。我担心的是，“我会后悔什么？” And people can regret completely different things. So risk is never a blanket metric. What looks crazy to you might be something I’d regret if I didn’t try. People can have different risk tolerances in the same category, like volatility. But there are other categories that one person may regret that another wouldn’t even think about, like embarrassment and prestige. This is why risk can be such a heated debate, and why one person’s thoughtful decision looks crazy to someone else. 人们可能后悔完全不同的事情。所以风险绝不是一揽子指标。对你看起来疯狂的事情，对我可能是不试一下会后悔的事情。人们可以在同一类别中拥有不同的风险承受能力，如波动性的承受。但是其他一些类别，有人可能会因其后悔而另外一些人甚至不会想到，比如尴尬和威望。这就是为什么对于风险会有如此激烈的争论，为什么一个人的深思熟虑的决定对其他人来说看起来是疯狂的。 But a few regrets tend to be universal. 但是有一些后悔是是普遍存在的。 One is a decision that can’t easily be reversed. What you value changes over time. So long-term commitments that can’t be reneged on – concentrated illiquid assets, or debt that can’t be discharged – is a risk landmine. Stuff you can change your mind about – careers, employers, friends, liquid investments – don’t have to be long-term regrettable, even if dealing with them hurts for a while. 一类是那些不容易逆转的决策。你认为有价值的东西会随时间而改变。因此，无法改变主意的长期承诺 —比如集中的非流动资产或无法解除的债务 — 是风险的地雷。你可以改变主意 — 不管是职业，雇主，朋友，流动性投资 —这些不会长期令人后悔，即使处理他们让你受到一段时间的伤害。 Another is a decision with downside so severe that it prevents eventual recovery. Getting wiped out. Getting banned. Getting convicted. Severe reputational harm. You’ll regret decisions that lead you there because their stench will stick to you long after you try to scrub them off and move on. 另一类是负面后果非常严重让你无法翻身的决策。被清出局。被禁止。被定罪。严重的声誉伤害。你会后悔那些把你引到那里的决定，因为在你试图将它们擦掉并继续前进的时候，它们的恶臭会长时间粘在你身上。 So risk management comes down to serially avoiding decisions that can’t easily be reversed, whose downsides will demolish you and prevent recovery. 因此，风险管理可以归结为避免不容易逆转的决策，而且其负面后果会摧毁你并阻止你复兴。 I think that’s true for investments, business models, careers, relationships, etc. 我认为这对投资、商业模式、职业、人际关系等都是如此。 And when you frame it like that, risk management doesn’t seem that complicated. 当你像这样理解风险的时候，风险管理似乎并不那么复杂。 The first thing you have to do is value having options. I remember a driver’s ed class where the instructor said something like, “No matter where you are on the road, always have enough room to stop and a place to pull over.” It gets dangerous when you’re boxed in with limits on how you can react to something you didn’t expect. You’ll regret wanting to do something but not being able to do it. 你要做的第一件事就是让自己拥有选择。我记得一个司机的培训班上教练说的话，“无论你在路上的哪个地方，一定保证自己有空间可以停下来，并且可以靠边。” 当你被包围起来，无法应对意想不到的事情的时候，事情就危险了。你会后悔想要做某事但却无法做到。 The second is a religious appreciation for unknowns. There’s all kinds of stuff out there that you don’t know about, and stuff that doesn’t exist yet you’ll eventually learn about. Unknowns are dangerous because even if they’re small, your lack of preparedness to deal with them is like an embedded form of leverage. This is the basis for wanting options and having “an out,” even – or especially – when you don’t think you’ll need it. 第二是对未知世界保持宗教般的敬畏。那里有你不知道的各种东西，还有那些现在不存在但你最终会了解的东西。未知是危险的，因为即使它们很小，但由于你缺乏应对它们的准备就像内嵌了杠杆作用（后果会放大）。这就是你需要拥有选择和能退出的原因，尤其是当你认为自己不需要它们的时候。 Knock those two out and you’re ready to take some risk. 去掉了这两件事情，你就可以去承担一些风险了。 Good risks are those that you will both regret not taking and won’t regret if they backfire. This was Bezos’s point: He would regret not trying to build Amazon even if it failed. 好的风险是那些你没做会后悔但是失败了不会后悔的事情。这是Bezos的观点：即使失败，如果没有做亚马逊，他会后悔，即使亚马逊失败了不会改变这一点。 This all sounds easy, up until now. 到目前为止，这一切听起来很简单。 Taking good risks requires knowing both the odds of failure and how that failure will affect you afterwards. Which are difficult things to know. Often impossible. Especially because we’re likely to overestimate our personal odds of success. You have to overestimate your odds of success, or else you’d be paralyzed most of the time. Optimism is a rational form of ignorance. That’s part of what makes risk management really hard. 承担好的风险需要了解：失败的可能性以及失败对你影响程度。这是比较难以评估的事情。经常不可能。特别是因为我们可能常常高估我们个人的成功概率。你必须高估你成功的概率，否则你大部分时间都会不敢行动。乐观是一种无知的一种理性形式。这是导致风险管理变得非常困难的部分原因。 So the best we can do is work hard to put the odds of avoiding positive and negative regrets in your favor. But you can’t tame those odds. You can’t make them both 100%, because something with a 100% chance of success is probably so boring that you’ll eventually regret not swinging harder. 因此，我们所能做的最好的事情就是努力让避免正面和反面后悔的概率对你有利。但你无法驯服这些可能性。你不能把它们都变成100％。因为有100％成功概率的东西可能是如此无聊，以至于你最终会后悔没有做的更猛一点。 Actual risk management is understanding that even if you do everything you can to avoid regrets, you are at best dealing with odds, and all reasonable odds are less than 100. So there is a measurable chance you’ll be disappointed, no matter how hard you’ll try or how smart you are. The biggest risk – the biggest regret – happens when you ignore that reality. 现实的风险管理是要理解：即使你做了所有避免后悔的事情， 你最多也是在和概率博弈， 所有合理的概率都低于100%。 所以，一定程度上你还是会失望，不管你多么努力尝试或者你有多聪明。当你忽视这个现实，最大的风险 — 最大的后悔 — 就会发生。 Carl Richards got this right, and it’s a humbling but accurate view of the world: “Risk is what’s left over when you think you’ve thought of everything.” 卡尔理.查兹说的对，这是一个令人羞愧但准确的世界观：“风险是当你认为你已经想到了一切之后剩下来的事情。” Good luck. We all need it. 祝你好运。我们都需要它。 |
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