When I was born, I was given something extraordinary. So were you. Every one of us enters the world with a golden goose, although almost none of us ever realise it. I call my goose Risk.

For the first few years of my life, my parents looked after it for me. They decided where it went, what it was allowed to do and, more importantly, what it wasn’t. Like most children, my goose didn’t get out very much. It was protected. Kept safe. Then, almost without noticing, ownership transferred to me.

At first, I took the goose everywhere. Onto the cricket field where, every now and then, it laid a golden egg in the form of a match-winning six. Other days it had me back in the pavilion before the scorer had found out my name. Football was much the same. Sometimes a winning goal. More often I ended up flat on my backside leaving my teammates wondering why I was in the team. (You know who you are.) Curiously, I remember few of the failures. I remember the sixes, the goals and the golden eggs. As I grew older, though, I became much more selective about where I took my goose. There were places where embarrassment seemed too high a price to pay. Discos. Nightclubs. Talking to girls. The possibility of rejection persuaded me to leave the goose safely at home.

Then work arrived and, almost by accident, I started taking the goose with me every day. Into meetings. Into the stock market. Sometimes it rewarded me. Sometimes it embarrassed me. Sometimes it cost me money. Yet every worthwhile investment I have ever made, every opportunity I have ever grasped and every success I have ever enjoyed began by taking the goose out without knowing whether it would lay a golden egg.

That, I think, is why we all struggle with investing. They spend a lifetime building a nest egg, only to lock it away somewhere so safe that nothing bad can happen. Unfortunately, very little good can happen there either. Investing has never been about avoiding or even minimising risk. It has always been about accepting enough uncertainty to give your savings the chance to grow. Most days the goose comes home empty-handed. Occasionally it even pecks you. But over a lifetime, the golden eggs outweigh the disappointments. That’s not just true of investing. It is true of life itself.

One day, if we are lucky, someone else will inherit the golden eggs we have collected. Our children, our grandchildren. They will not remember the size of the nest nearly as much as they will remember the stories. The goal that should never have gone in. The family holiday where the car broke down, it rained all week and everyone laughed about it for years afterwards because, just for once, you chose Sweden instead of the Dordogne.

Golden eggs do not simply make our finances richer. They make our lives richer too. So, when we look back over our lives, it is rarely the days we played safe that we treasure. It is the days we took the goose out. Do you know where your goose is?