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I Took A Risk on Tony Robbins

One of my favourite Larry David quotes (from Curb Your Enthusiasm) is “I TOOK A RISK!” He usually says it when something goes wrong and he is looking to escape facing personal consequences for his actions with the defence that his intentions were good but the outcome was unfortunately bad.I like this phrase because it has helped me to get over my fear of being wrong in some cases and allowed me to take a chance, knowing that if I end up in a bad place, I can say “I took a risk” and that would be the end of it.

As it turns out, I would say that over the past couple of years, I have taken quite a few risks, most of which have ended up with good results, but I have had to use the phrase a few times - either out loud or as part of my own inner self-talk instead of beating myself up with blame and regret - and it has served me well.

Obviously, the nature of the risk is key, but I would generally recommend that people take a few more risks and not fear the potential failure because 1) you can always just say “I took a risk” and 2) every risk can be viewed as an experiment, where the outcome doesn’t really matter if you have learned something.

Let me give you an example of one such experiment I did recently:

Everything I knew - or thought I knew - about Tony Robbins was that he was a showman, who put a spell on people, and made money from his brilliant selling skills. So I decided to steer clear and stick with learning from more respected sources. But then I saw a friend had the CDs and I was also in the frame of mind where I was going to try things for myself rather than passing judgment based on little information, so I borrowed the CDs and started to listen. In other words, I took a risk, albeit a small one because all it cost me was my time. But I figured that if I learned it was all crap then I had still bought a valuable lesson with my time anyway, so it was worth doing regardless of the outcome. (Like a science experiment, I guess.)

Well, the outcome was that I think it was both worth it as an experiment and worth it because I have discovered a real gem! Tony Robbins is a brilliant communicator, there’s no doubt about it, but the message he is communicating fits with everything else I have learned from elsewhere (and I have been learning a LOT recently about physics, psychology, human anatomy, economics, biology, philosophy, etc, etc). So I haven’t really heard anything new from him, but he has made me want to take action with what I already knew. One analogy would be to say that he has brought the picture into focus and, more importantly, shown me that the picture is actually a map that leads somewhere pretty pretty good.

If you’re going to take anything away from this post, I hope it’s that you will take a few more risks, you will try more things out for yourself rather than listening to negative noise from others, and that you might want to start your experimenting with a Tony Robbins CD collection. The one I have been listening to is “Get The Edge”, which came with “Personal Power Classic Edition”.