One of the parts of creating a business that I’m enjoying the most is how many hypothetical “what ifs” I’ve been able to let go of.

I used to ask myself, what if it’s not successful? The answer now feels simple: who cares? The older I get, the more willing I am to try, to take risks, or even explore without a clear plan. Maybe for the first time in my life.

We often tell young people to take risks while they’re still early in life and have less to lose. I don’t disagree with that. In fact, I’ve been thinking about how I might encourage my friends’ kids to take more meaningful risks than I did in my teens and twenties.

But what I’ve learned recently is that risk-taking feels more like a muscle than a moment. The more I practice it, the more natural it becomes. That feels like a skill, just like creativity. The two easiest personal examples of risk for me have been teaching myself to trade options and pushing myself out of my introverted state to build a stronger local network.

What also intrigues me about risk is how much it varies from person to person, even among those with experience. This leads me to believe that while experience is important, it’s not the only factor that leads to better decisions or projections.

This has led me to ask: what makes some people more willing to take calculated risks than others? What’s the actual difference between people who act on intuition and those who don’t?

I used to think this was mostly about agency, and to a degree, it is. But the more I think about it, agency feels too broad. The real gap I keep seeing is confidence in navigating ambiguity. And that’s what I want Incipient Strategies to help solve.

At its core, Incipient Strategies is about helping others build the life they want, especially people who feel stuck because they’re “past school” and may believe they’ve missed the on-ramps traditional education was supposed to provide.

When I talk to close friends and others in my circle about what holds them back, I’ve noticed many of them can’t quite articulate the hesitation they feel. I think a missing piece in the entrepreneurial space is the kind of delusional encouragement that pushes people to keep going. To remind them their idea isn’t crazy. That there’s always a real place to begin turning a vision into reality.

The simplest way I’ve started to see it is this: many people are focusing on the work, rather than discovering the obsession.

Most people I know never really learned how to keep educating themselves after school ended. School teaches us to memorize, to test, to perform. But rarely to question, adapt, or teach ourselves.

It also skips the real-life stuff. How to talk about money. How to make decisions under uncertainty. How to understand financial risk. And when you can’t talk about money, you can’t talk about freedom. That’s part of what pushed me to start Incipient Strategies. I want to help close that gap.