Risk-Taking Secrets from World Record Skydiver Jim McCormick

” Everything we do during the course of any given day is a risk because we don’t know the outcome until it’s been completed.”

This week on Delay the Decay, I interview risk expert and world-record skydiver Jim McCormick, founder of the Research Institute for Risk Intelligence and author of The Power of Risk, about intelligent risk-taking, leadership, and mortality. We discuss understanding one’s changing “risk quotient,” balancing teams with complementary risk profiles, and how commitments like family affect decisions.

Jim shares lessons from skydiving—passion, preparation, delegation, redundancy (main and reserve chutes), and “no plan survives first contact”—including the year-plus planning behind a 400-person record jump. He advocates a “culture of permission” for innovation and recommends bolstering competence to take constructive risks.