Every unconventional decision I've made looked risky from the outside.
Leaving academia with a PhD and no business experience: risky. Building a science communications consultancy before the field had a name: risky. Living in a van while co-founding a venture-backed startup: risky. Opening a medical spa with no clinical background. Extremely risky, by most conventional assessments.
Here's what I've come to understand about those decisions, looking back: they weren't the risky ones. The risky choice, in each case, was the one I didn't take.
What "Safe" Actually Means
When we call a choice safe, we usually mean it's legible. Other people understand it. It follows a known path with a known outcome distribution. There's social proof that it works, or at least that it's survivable.
What we rarely account for is whether that path leads anywhere we actually want to go.
The "safe" choice when I was finishing my postdoctoral fellowship was to stay in academic science, continuing down a path with clear steps, institutional validation, and a predictable (if grueling) career arc. The risk of that path was that I'd be optimizing for legibility at the expense of everything I actually cared about. The cost of the safe choice wasn't financial ruin. It was slow, certain drift toward a life I didn't want.
Safe choices aren't low-risk. They're just risks with better PR.
Every "safe" path has a downside distribution. It just tends to manifest slowly: in years of diminishing engagement, in the gap between your capabilities and what the role actually requires, in the growing weight of a life built around someone else's definition of success. Those risks are real, just less legible than the risks of doing something unconventional, so we tend not to put them on the scale when we're deciding. Research on risk aversion and career mobility consistently shows that people who avoid risk in career transitions don't avoid negative outcomes — they just trade visible risk for invisible stagnation.
The Decision to Leave Academia
I was a research scientist studying aging, inflammation, and longevity at the NIH. I loved the science. I didn't love the institution: its pace, its politics, its almost religious insistence that the only legitimate path forward was a faculty position and a lab of your own.
The risk I was told I was taking by leaving: giving up a prestigious career, walking away from years of investment, starting over in a field I knew nothing about.
The risk I was actually avoiding: spending the next decade building a career that had been designed by someone else's assumptions about what a person with my credentials should want.
I left. I built science communications into a real business. I worked with AbbVie, Procter & Gamble, AI drug design companies, cancer immunology startups. I built methodologies that helped teams get smarter faster. None of it was on the map when I started. All of it was built from the skills I already had. I just had to apply them in a new direction.
The "risky" choice turned out to be the one with more options, more leverage, and more alignment with what I actually cared about. The safe choice would have given me one path: well-worn and narrowing.
The Van, the Startup, and the $3.3 Million
When my husband and I built out a Sprinter van and started living nomadically, we were doing something that looked, to most people, like opting out. Career on pause. Stability abandoned. Why would you do that?
What we were actually doing was running an experiment. We were testing a life design hypothesis: that you could build something real while living unconventionally, that location-independence was a feature rather than a constraint, that the conventional trade-off between stability and freedom was less fixed than it seemed.
Along the way, I started building @vanthere, a community and content platform around van life and nomadic living. What started as a way to document the experiment became something else: a real audience of people living the same life, or wanting to. By the time I co-founded Sēkr, @vanthere wasn't just a social account. It was proof of market. I was the user. I had the community. When we pitched investors on a platform for outdoor and nomadic travelers, I could point to tens of thousands of people who already trusted me to understand their lives. The influencer chapter wasn't a detour from the founder chapter. It was the evidence.
I met my co-founder on the road, and we built Sēkr together. We raised $3.3 million. We built a platform that real people used to travel in ways the existing infrastructure didn't support. None of that required a WeWork membership or a Bay Area address. It required good judgment, consistent execution, and the willingness to look strange while doing it.
The risk of living conventionally would have been building something that looked right from the outside and felt wrong from the inside, which is quietly what happens to a lot of founders who optimize for optics over alignment.
Building a Medical Brand Without an Aesthetic Background
SOM Aesthetics was the decision that raised the most eyebrows, at least from people who didn't know me well. My close friends weren't particularly surprised. They could see the throughline even when it looked like a departure from the outside.
I'm not a physician and I'm not a licensed medical provider of any kind. My clinical background is in research: years studying aging and inflammation at the NIH, including work on the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging in Humans. What I didn't have was experience operating a medical practice, or any background in aesthetics or dermatology. Aesthetic medicine does carry real requirements: practitioners need proper licensure, certain procedures require physician oversight, and compliance matters. But it's not the heavily controlled environment of clinical research or a hospital setting. For a scientific operator who knew how to hire around gaps and build compliant infrastructure, those requirements were navigable.
It was also a deliberate shift away from the venture-backed startup path: a different model, a different kind of ownership, a different pace. What I brought was a decade of working in science communications, genuine scientific fluency across medical and aesthetic science, and the ability to build operational infrastructure from scratch. I hired exceptional clinical talent and built around their expertise rather than trying to replace it. I still design and run clinical studies at SOM today. The science never left. It just found a new application.
The conventional wisdom said: you need to be a practitioner to build in this space. What I found was that being an operator with genuine scientific fluency was the rarer and more valuable thing to bring. The institutional permission was the thing I left behind. The understanding came with me.
What I've Learned About Risk
Risk isn't the absence of a safe path. Risk is the delta between where you're headed and where you want to end up.
The safest-looking choices are often the ones with the highest hidden risk: the risk of ending up somewhere you didn't choose, having optimized for something that wasn't actually worth optimizing for. Unconventional choices carry visible risks: you can see what might go wrong, plan for it, course-correct. The hidden risks of the safe path are harder to see until it's much later and much harder to change.
I'm not arguing for recklessness. I'm arguing for honest accounting. When you're evaluating a decision, put both paths on the scale, not just the one that looks riskier. Ask what happens if the safe choice works exactly as intended. Ask if you want to end up there. If the answer is no, the safe choice is the risky one.
Suffering isn't proof of commitment. And the path that asks for the least sacrifice isn't necessarily the one that costs you the least.