BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM
After two years of conversations with founders, executives, and leaders across industries, Liz Tran kept noticing the same thing: the most successful and fulfilled among them were not the ones who knew the most. They were the ones who had made peace with not knowing.
Tran, a leadership coach and the author of AQ: A New Kind of Intelligence for a World That’s Always Changing, calls this the Agility Quotient. In a job market reshaped by artificial intelligence, IQ, the capacity to absorb and process information, is becoming less differentiating. What matters now, she argues, is the ability to adapt when circumstances change, fail without shutting down, and keep moving. Building AQ starts with a willingness to get better at something most people would rather avoid: risk and failure.
Where you actually are with risk right now
Before building anything, Tran suggests starting with an honest assessment. She offers a three-level framework in her book. Think of a stressful situation you have faced recently and consider how you handled it.
At the lowest level, you find yourself avoiding the problem or minimizing it without actually addressing it. At the middle level, you acknowledge the difficulty and try to improve your situation, but you are still fighting it. “There’s a sense that you’re feeling like, ‘why is this happening to me?’… There’s a resentment and maybe even an anger about what your situation is,” Tran says. The highest level is choosing to meet whatever comes, failure included. It does not mean you like the circumstances, but it does mean “you’re seeing it as something to move through,” Tran says, “rather than just something you resent.” That shift also, she adds, helps protect against burnout.
Trade “know-it-all” for “learn-it-all”
One of the most actionable shifts Tran recommends is reorienting from expertise to learning. She draws on the transformation Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella led, changing the company’s culture from one that prized being “know-it-alls” to one that rewarded “learn-it-alls.” In an environment where AI can absorb information faster than any person, the edge no longer lives in what you already know. It lives in how quickly you are willing to experiment, pivot, and reinvent yourself. The new work environment, Tran says, “rewards people who move fast.” That requires letting go of the ego investment in always having the answer.
Build an anchor before you take risks
Here is where Tran’s approach surprises most people. “Agility requires stability,” she says. The freedom to take risks requires a foundation of security elsewhere. That might be a close relationship, a consistent exercise routine, or a physical place that feels like home, anything that creates reliable groundedness in areas of life you can control.
“In order to feel psychologically grounded and stable enough to go out there and take risks, you actually need a cushion of comfort and security,” Tran says. Without it, pushing too far into uncertainty can tip the nervous system into fight-or-flight, which impairs the cognitive functioning you need to navigate that uncertainty well. The goal, she says, is a sweet spot: stretched, but not overwhelmed.
Practice discomfort in low-stakes situations
Tran recommends building a habit of regular small discomforts to condition yourself for larger ones. She reframes “risk” as “bet.” A risk implies a downside. A bet implies an unknown outcome with a real chance of winning. The psychological difference matters.
“You start with risks that are tolerable,” she says. Reaching out to someone outside your existing network. Trying a new setting for a meeting. Setting a goal you are not sure you can achieve. Over time, the threshold for what feels tolerable shifts, and things that once felt anxiety-inducing start to feel manageable.
Track recovery rate, not outcomes
When Tran began taking more risks herself, she stopped measuring success by results and started measuring it by recovery speed. If you make seven attempts in a week and none of them succeed, “even though that’s to be expected when you’re putting yourself out there for risk-taking and failure all the time,” and you evaluate only the outcomes, you will feel like you have failed. But if you track how quickly you got back up, you begin to see real progress. “What you actually want to do is to track your recovery rate,” she says.
The goal is a shortening gap between setback and forward motion. That narrowing gap, over time, is evidence that the tolerance is genuine.
See setbacks as doors that didn’t exist before
If you optimize for outcomes all the time, Tran argues, “we’re actually missing the broader target, which is to learn and become agile enough to succeed.” Failure, reframed, is how you end up somewhere you couldn’t have planned.
She speaks from personal experience. “In my career, I have failed so spectacularly,” she says. But those failures made her current work possible. “What I had planned didn’t work out, but actually, it helped open my eyes to a different path that I never would have mapped out for myself.”
The point of building AQ is not that you start to enjoy failure. It is that you start to trust what tends to follow it, and that trust, built through small daily bets over time, is what makes the next risk feel worth taking.
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