What a 13-Year-Old Migrant Knows About Risk

I read Ousman Umar’s North to Paradise on a flight to Lisbon last year. By the time I landed I’d been quietly recalibrating for about five hours.

Umar grew up in a village in Ghana. At thirteen, he left. He walked. He spent more than four years crossing the Sahara, working in Libya, surviving boats across the Mediterranean, getting deported, trying again, watching companions die. He was twenty when he finally reached Barcelona. He built a life there. Now he runs an NGO that builds schools in his home region.

That’s the outline. The book is the texture. The hunger, the betrayals, the brief kindnesses, the cousins who didn’t make it. What I want to write about, though, is not Umar’s story. It’s the way reading it broke something in my vocabulary.

Specifically, the word risk.

I run a small business. Like a lot of people in that position, I use the word risk all day long.

“That client is a risk.” Meaning: they pay slowly.

“This launch is risky.” Meaning: it might underperform and I’ll feel embarrassed for two weeks.

“I’m taking a risk on this new offer.” Meaning: I might earn less than I would have if I kept doing the safe boring thing.

By the standards of any Western freelancer’s life, this is normal language. We talk about risk constantly. We weigh it. We optimize it. There are entire books about how to think about it.

And then I read about a thirteen-year-old who decided to walk across the Sahara because the village he was from could not provide what he needed, and the word risk started feeling like a costume I’d been wearing.

What Umar took on was risk. The thing where you might literally die in a desert, after watching the person walking next to you die first. What I’ve been calling risk is something else. Something smaller. Something that, in the worst case, is mostly about my self-image.

I don’t want to make this a guilt-trip post. I’m not going to tell you that your problems aren’t real. They’re real. Mine are real. The undercharging client, the failed launch, the project that wastes a year: those are real costs and they deserve serious thinking.

But I think we’ve quietly inflated the language, and the inflation costs us something.

Here’s the part of Umar’s story that actually changed how I think.

He didn’t walk because he was brave. He walked because the alternatives were, for him, worse. He was a child making a survival calculation with the only information he had, in a context where staying still was its own kind of dying. The “risk” he took wasn’t a heroic choice. It was a least-bad option.

Most of what we call risk in comfortable Western lives is the opposite. It’s the first-best option dressed up as a hard decision to make it feel weighty. “Should I quit my job to start a business?” That’s not risk in Umar’s sense. That’s a comparatively safe move taken by someone with a savings account, healthcare access, and a community that will not let them starve. The discomfort is real. The risk is performance.

Once I started seeing that, a few things shifted.

I noticed that I was using risk-language to gain credit for moves that didn’t really require courage. Calling something risky lets you feel brave about it before the outcome is known. It’s a small ego trick. The freelancer who “took the risk” of raising rates is just doing what their financial position already allowed them to do.

I noticed how much of my hesitation was about embarrassment, not survival. The “risk” of launching a new offer that flops is the risk of friends and competitors seeing me fail in public. That’s a real cost. I’m not minimizing it. But it’s not on the same continuum as walking across the desert. Calling both of them risk made me act like both deserved the same caution. They don’t.

I noticed I was systematically underestimating my actual margin. I have a real safety net. I have skills the market wants. I have a network that would catch me. The downside of most “risks” I face is “I’d be uncomfortable for six months.” That’s a downside worth respecting. It is not survival.

If you read North to Paradise (and I think you should), you won’t come away ready to romanticize migration. Umar would not want you to. The book is too honest for that. The journey was not a hero’s path. It was a horror that he survived by accidents of luck and the mercy of strangers. He would have skipped it if anything else had been possible.

But you might come away with a recalibrated vocabulary. You might stop using the word risk to describe a quarter where you might earn less than you hoped. You might find a different word for “I’m scared to pitch this client because they might say no.” That word is fear. Sometimes it’s discomfort. Occasionally it’s pride. Almost never is it risk, in the sense Umar’s life makes the word mean.

The smaller our actual risks are, the more we tend to inflate them. I think this is partly why so much creator content is so anxious. We’ve built lives that are, by historical standards, almost absurdly stable, and we’ve responded by treating ordinary choices as existential. It’s a kind of inverted bravery. We make small moves and feel large emotions about them.

The cost of that inflation is that we hesitate at the wrong moments. We treat “do I send this email” with the gravity that should be reserved for “do I leave the village.” Then, when something actually serious does happen (a real illness, a real loss, the kind of upheaval Umar’s whole life was made of), we have no emotional language left, because we used it up on launches and pitches.

I’m not asking you to feel guilty for having a comfortable life. Use the comfort. Build with it. Take what you’d call risks and what Umar would call rounding errors and make something of them.

What I’m asking is that you let the word risk mean what it actually means, and find different words for the smaller things. Some of those smaller things are still hard and still worth doing. They’re just not the same as betting your life.

I think about the parts of this that connect to other things I’ve written. The courage to be average at most things is one of them, because most of the “risk” of average performance is just bruised pride; why I regret not starting sooner is another, because the safe move I delayed for years was never actually risky, and treating it as if it were stole a decade.

But mostly I think about a thirteen-year-old in a desert, walking because the village couldn’t hold him anymore. He wouldn’t have used the word risk for that. He would have called it the only thing left to try.

That, I think, is what the word is for.