The risk is the work

I. The Quiet Death of Originality

We live in a culture obsessed with safety nets.

Every path now comes with a playbook: launch strategies, funding templates, step-by-step guides to scaling brands, designing careers, even architecting creative lives. We have convinced ourselves that risk is something that can be outsmarted. That if you do the right research, build the right team, and follow the right models, you can create without chaos.

But truly original work, the kind that shapes culture, identity, and memory, has never been built on guarantees.

It has always been built on something far less comfortable: risk.

Risk isn’t an accident in the process.

It isn’t a failure of planning.

It’s the work itself.

To create something that didn’t exist before is, by definition, an act of uncertainty.

There is no data for what you are about to become.

No perfect blueprint for what you are building.

And no one can carry the weight of that ambiguity for you.

In a world chasing predictability, to choose to create at all is a form of rebellion.

According to a 2023 McKinsey Global Innovation Report, 84% of executives agree that innovation is critical to growth, yet less than 6% feel confident managing the risks that come with it.

Risk isn’t the enemy of building. Risk is the birthplace of it.

II. A Personal Note

There’s a kind of loneliness in building something from scratch that no roadmap can erase.

Growing up, ambition wasn't a glossy idea. It was a necessity. A survival instinct.

My mother was my first and greatest example of risk-taking. A woman with fierce, relentless energy, what I often describe as her Leo fire. She embraced every opportunity, owned every outcome, and carried an unspoken understanding that giving up simply wasn’t an option.

But her story wasn’t built without sacrifice.

Her dream of becoming a journalist, fueled by a passion for political science and public discourse, was slowly edged out by circumstance. Societal constructs. Entrenched patriarchy. The kind of quiet systemic forces that don't shatter dreams overnight, but erode them over time.

She became a designer, not by choice, but by necessity.

Watching her taught me early that risk wasn’t recklessness.

It was resilience.

It was the willingness to move forward even when the conditions weren't fair, perfect, or promised.

So when we started CORE, my first venture with my mom, I wasn't operating with naivety.

There were barely any performance playbooks or consumer trend maps guiding sustainability narratives. I relied on instinct, belief, and a willingness to risk without guarantee.

And later, leaving structured industries to build Form & Flow, the pattern repeated itself.

It would have been easier to stay within existing systems.

But the work that called to me wasn’t about safety.

It was about how brands live before they are understood, and how meaning is shaped through intention, not momentum.

Every time I’ve built something true, it felt like stepping into a room no one had drawn yet.

That discomfort, the fear, the emotional volatility wasn’t a sign of failure.

It was the signal that I was exactly where I needed to be.

III.The Risk Is the Work

We’re conditioned to believe that risk is a bug in the system.

A glitch to be managed, reduced, spun into security.

But risk is not an error.

It’s the signal that you’re operating where maps end and instinct begins.

The artists, founders, writers, and thinkers we revere didn’t succeed because they eliminated risk.

They succeeded because they learned how to carry it.

To walk with uncertainty without letting it shrink their ideas.

To create anything truly original is to sit inside a paradox:

You have to believe in something you cannot yet prove.

There is no product-market fit for a story that hasn't been told yet.

There is no guaranteed ROI for beauty.

There is no assurance of scale for something still becoming itself.

Risk looks different across industries.

In fashion, it's challenging dominant aesthetics. In tech, it's betting on needs users can't yet articulate. In food and hospitality, it's trusting experience over speed.

But across sectors, the constant is the same: if you avoid risk, you avoid relevance.

If certainty is your only goal, you will build replicas.

If resilience is your commitment, you will build something that holds.

IV.The Cost of Playing Safe

When brands, founders, or artists treat risk as something to be eliminated rather than embraced, three things happen:

1. Safe Work Defaults to Mediocrity

Without risk, brands recycle.

They create what has already been validated by algorithms, focus groups, or competitors.

The result?

A flood of indistinguishable aesthetics, interchangeable experiences, and ideas that vanish faster than they can be remembered.

"In saturated markets, safety looks like invisibility."

2. Originality Shrinks Under the Weight of Scale

Data-driven strategies are powerful, but over-optimisation flattens nuance.

It removes the slowness, messiness, and emotional volatility that true creativity requires.

The fastest way to kill an idea is to demand proof it will work before you let it live.

3. The Creative Economy Becomes a Content Economy

When risk aversion becomes the norm, creative industries stop producing culture and start producing content.

Outputs become more frequent, but less significant.

Memory fades.

Nothing stays.

According to a 2023 Deloitte study, 71% of consumers globally struggle to differentiate between brands in creative sectors like fashion, hospitality, and lifestyle.

Not because there’s too little choice but because there’s too little courage.

V.The Builders Who Walked Into the Unknown

The entrepreneurs and cultural builders who changed industries didn’t succeed because they had certainty.

They succeeded because they moved without it, and built the certainty after.

• Rei Kawakubo, founder of Comme des Garçons, launched deconstructed fashion against the grain of Western beauty ideals, risking ridicule to redefine elegance itself.

• Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone without customer validation, building a future the market couldn’t yet imagine.

• Faye D’Souza stepped away from mainstream newsrooms to create independent journalism in a landscape built on spectacle over substance.

Every one of them walked into a space without maps.

And in doing so, expanded what the map could hold for everyone else.

VI. What Cannot Be Predicted

Risk is not the price you pay for ambition.

It’s the proof that you’re doing something that matters.

In a world that glorifies scale, safety, and certainty, choosing to create from instinct, from feeling, from belief, is an act of quiet rebellion.

The most enduring work, brands, books, ideas, and institutions, wasn’t built by those who waited for guarantees.

It was built by those who moved despite their absence.

If you are waiting for absolute clarity before you build, you will never begin.

If you are waiting for certainty before you trust yourself, you will never create anything real.

Risk is not the shadow that follows the work.

Risk is the work.

To step into uncertainty, to make decisions with incomplete maps, to feel fear and still move—this isn’t failure.

It’s the rarest kind of creative stamina.

Because anyone can build what has already been proven.

But to build what hasn’t been named yet, that’s the work that shapes the future.

And you don't shape the future by staying safe.

You shape it by choosing to show up anyway.

Risk is a strategic muscle.

For leaders, founders, and creators alike, learning to navigate uncertainty isn’t optional. It’s the only durable skill left.

At the edge of fear is not failure. It’s everything you came here to build.