Risk taking has been getting a bit of a bad rap with the banking meltdown.  The psychologist Frank Farley coined the term Big T personality to describe people who actively seek risk (sometimes also referred to as thrill seeking).  There is a neat little interview with Farley about Big T personality and the financial crisis as part of a longer article on TheWhyFiles about fear on Wall Street.  In the interview, Farley draws a distinction between T-positive and T-negative types.  As Farley puts it:

There are positive and negative risk takers. We need the healthy, positive types to get to the moon, to solve our problems, to be creative. (…) But there is what I call the T-negative, a form of thrill-seeking with destructive features, impulsiveness, disregard for other people, placing other people at risk.

I was reminded of the rewards of positive risk taking yesterday by the new Star Trek movie.  When I first saw stills from the project, with all the young faces on the bridge, I thought “this could really suck!"  Well, I saw the movie yesterday and like pretty much everybody else thought it was awesome.  J.J. Abrams took a lot of creative risks by taking on a franchise with a die-hard fan base and essentially hitting the reboot button through that wonderful scifi staple of time travel.

The risks all paid off.  The movie has a tight plot, stunning visuals, comic relief (by Simon Pegg) and the casting works out amazingly well.  In hindsight, it is now easy to see that the much bigger risk would have been to try to make a movie that doesn’t break with the past (although one might argue that had been tried with the movies based on Next Generation, ending with the abysmal Nemesis in 2002).  We clearly have a bias though that identifies doing something different and new as risk taking, whereas staying the course is considered safe.  Possibly on purpose, that is in fact one of the plot lines of the movie itself, as Kirk decides to go after Nero instead of rejoining the fleet.  Something worth remembering for startups and one’s personal life!