Risk Is What You Don’t See

Risk Is What You Don’t See

Jan 14, 2020 by Morgan Housel

Harry Houdini was more than an escape artist. Anything that made people gasp interested him and was something he would try. One of his famous tricks was letting big men punch him in the gut as hard as they could. Houdini – an amateur boxer before becoming a magician – said he could flex his muscles in a way that could absorb any blow. The stunt matched what people loved about his escapes: the idea that his body could conquer physics.

One day in 1926 Houdini was resting in his dressing room after a performance when a group of students from McGill came in to visit. One of the students, Jocelyn Gordon Whitehead, asked, “Is it true, Mr. Houdini, that you can resist the hardest blows struck to the abdomen?”

Without warning he then began slamming his fist into Houdini.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s book The Edge of Unknown writes:

Houdini stopped him suddenly in the midst of a punch, with a gesture that he had had enough.

Houdini immediately after stated that he had had no opportunity to prepare himself against the blows, as he did not think that Whitehead would strike him as suddenly as he did and with such force, and that he would have been in a better position to prepare for the blows if he had arisen from the couch for this purpose.

A day later Houdini was doubled over with abdominal pain. His appendix was ruptured, almost certainty from Whitehead’s blows.

And then Harry Houdini died.

The riskiest stuff is always what you don’t see coming.

Risk is complicated, which is why we’re not great at dealing with it. It’s more than just something bad happening. How risky something is depends on whether its target is prepared for it. A big event people have time to prepare for can be handled without much fuss. A smaller one out of the blue can be deadly.

Houdini – who buried himself under six feet of dirt in a straight jacket and dug himself out weeks before he was killed by a student’s jab – learned this the hard way.

It’s also something we should remember when thinking about the economy and our investments.

The biggest economic risk is what no one’s talking about, because if no one’s talking about no one’s prepared for it, and if no one’s prepared for it its damage will be amplified when it arrives.

To continue reading, please go to the original article here:

https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/risk-is-what-you-dont-see/