Pursuing professional independence pt 1 - Setting up motivational infrastructure

Hello world!

I’ve always struggled formulating goals positively, like “become lawyer”. Positive goals have always felt to have a predefined avenue and inherent exclusion of other equally desirable goals.

I’d favor directing away from something rather than towards something.

By saying no to a particular thing, i said yes to every other potential alternative I thought. Given my, i must confess, contrarian proclivity i’ve usually rejected the mainstream choice of a given situation and sought out niches. Or at least what felt like niches at the time; “I bet there is a much cooler or smarter choice i can make” (that will also make me look cool and special).

But a narrow avoidance-focus will result in unexpected costs.

French or German are mandatory subjects in regular high danish high schools. I did not want any of them. Instead, I favored a school focused on STEM subjects. Good choice of subjects, very costly tradeoff in exposure to opposite sex at a time where that felt as a top-2 important part of life.

Point is: I didn’t choose STEM, I avoided French and ended up also avoiding chicks.

But it’s not all costs and ego:

• Rejecting convention is very useful when convention is ineffective or inefficient.
• Capabilities can be more valuable when they’re niche.

So this is where I am now: I see bad conventions, I’ve developed particular skills, and I even have a positively formulated goal:

Become an independent advisory consultant of operational risk modelling and quantification.

1. Independent
   I like problem solving; analyzing resources and constraints and attempt actual solutions. This is often at odds with the 5-day 9-5 convention with performative corporate environments and office politics. Also there is a huge economic upside in “revenue over salary”.

2. Operational risk
   (Cyber, Physical, OT, etc) is riddled with two foundational problems (one the unavoidable result of the other):

   1. Compliance driven efforts by people untrained in reliable methodologies and audited by stale conventions of red/amber/green-analyses.
   2. It’s never used for actual business decision making: Allocation of resources and reasoning for why not to do something. Instead, there’s always an artificial urgency for fixing every little thing that could be better - with no practical interface to operational teams.

3. Modelling and quantification
   Re-introducing the operational risk specialist as a subject-matter professional. They enable automation, reliability, replicability, and actual decision support in the risk management process. Not after-the-fact stamping of “yellow”.

   1. If you’re compliance driven: We can automate and dramatically reduce overhead load.
   2. If you’re decision driven: We can show what choices are most likely to avoid the biggest losses and improve chance of reaching business objectives.

But becoming independent does not happen over night. And being the breadwinner of a family does not afford a high-risk strategy of abandoning steady salary.

✅ I want to avoid bad risk management practice and corporate conventions.
✅ I want to be an independent risk advisor that solves real cost- and decision problems.
✅ I have an idea for carving out a path to that goal.

Next step is to set up the life-conditions to enable the right risk profile: Dedicated time to build a small business with low financial risk.

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