The most swoon-worthy line in movies could arguably be when Nicolas Cage says to Cher in the 1987 Oscar-winner Moonstruck, “Playing it safe is just about the most dangerous thing a woman like you could do.” But you don’t have to be a romcom fan to take that advice to heart. Playing it safe, keeping things steady, following the well-worn path — that’s often the advice we hear when it comes to building a career, making big decisions, or charting a course in life.
But if you take even a casual glance at the careers of Washington’s most influential figures — the real movers and shakers, the people whose decisions leave lasting marks — you’ll start to notice a different pattern.
More often than not, the most significant breakthroughs, the moments that change everything, don’t come from incremental progress. They come from bold, calculated risks. And if you need a case study in what that kind of risk-taking looks like, Nick Muzin’s career offers a fascinating example.
Reframing Risk as Strategic Repositioning
The problem with the way most of us think about risk is that it’s so often framed in terms of potential loss — what might go wrong, what might be forfeited, what might not pan out. Security, status, reputation — these are the things people instinctively try to protect, even though history, particularly political history, tells a different story.
Time and again, the leaders who have left a real impact, from Franklin Roosevelt reshaping the American economy with the New Deal to Ronald Reagan radically redefining economic policy, haven’t viewed risk as some kind of reckless gamble. They’ve treated it as a necessary recalibration, a way of strategically positioning themselves and their ideas for the future.
Nick Muzin’s career is a testament to this idea. The decision to go to Yale Law School after already building a career in medicine? That wasn’t a detour. That was an expansion. It was the deliberate broadening of a skill set, a way to stack expertise on top of expertise, ensuring that when the right opportunities arose, he would be ready to step into them. And sure enough, that decision equipped him to steer through the complexities of governance and diplomacy with a credibility few can claim.
“I’ve always been interested in politics and in law, and I went to medical school interested in medicine, but my father had always encouraged me to go into medicine,” Muzin shares.
“And then I started thinking about public policy and what you could do as a doctor, and how you can influence public policy and medical administration. I saw how the health care system worked in the U.S. compared to Canada, where I grew up. So I thought that having the combination of degrees would be able to help me find a unique niche.”
This wasn’t an isolated move. When Nick Muzin made the choice to take time off from his final year of law school to work on George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign, he wasn’t putting his legal education on pause. He was adding an entirely new dimension to it. He was embedding himself in the practical realities of political tactics, gaining firsthand experience that would prove invaluable later. What might have seemed, on paper, like an interruption to his career path was actually an acceleration.
Building Coalitions Across Traditional Boundaries
Politics in America, for all its complexities, is often reduced to one dominant feature: division. We talk about red states and blue states, left and right, conservative and progressive, as though the lines are immovable, the walls impenetrable. And yet, history tells us that the biggest, most consequential policy achievements — landmark legislation like the Civil Rights Act or sweeping economic reforms — don’t happen without the ability to reach across those divides, to build coalitions that defy expectations.
Nick Muzin has built a career on exactly that kind of unconventional alliance-building. During his time as director of coalitions for the House Republican Conference, he focused on engaging communities that had not traditionally aligned with the conservative movement. He found genuine points of connection, recognizing that there are often untapped areas of common interest between groups that, on the surface, seem fundamentally opposed.
“I had been Tim Scott’s chief of staff for the first two years when he was in Congress, and then in 2012, after Mitt Romney lost the election to Barack Obama,” Muzin recalls. “The Republican Party did a real self-examination as to why they had failed in the election. They called it the autopsy report that the RNC did, and they identified that the Republican Party was losing ground among young people, among minorities, among women.
“My job there was to represent the entire Republican House majority, and to help them create outreach to various constituents — women, minorities, young millennial voters — and create programs and dialogue between the House Republican arm and all these different groups to hopefully be able to change the electoral trends.”
That kind of work isn’t easy. It requires stepping outside of familiar political circles, risking rejection, dealing with skepticism. It also demonstrates a core truth about risk-taking: that the most meaningful and transformative changes rarely happen within the confines of what feels comfortable.
Embracing Vulnerability Through Authentic Expertise
There’s an easier way to do things. You can play it safe by speaking in vague generalities, never committing to specifics, never putting yourself in a position where you might be challenged. Plenty of people do this, and in the short term, it might seem like a wise approach. Why open yourself up to unnecessary scrutiny? The reality is, those who take the risk of being specific, of bringing genuine expertise to the table, of making an argument that can be debated rather than dodged, tend to command far more respect and influence over time.
Nick Muzin’s approach at his consulting firm, Stonington Global, illustrates this perfectly. While many firms operate on long-term retainer models that insulate them from constant performance evaluation, Muzin chose to do something different. He implemented a month-to-month model that requires him and his team to continually prove their value. There’s no coasting, no resting on past success. It’s a model that might seem riskier, but in reality, it builds stronger, more meaningful relationships with clients who know they are getting tangible results.
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“We never ask for more than a one-month retainer,” he explains. “Every other firm, you have to sign a minimum of six months, a year retainer.
“We always go month to month. And that’s because we want to be invested with our clients and after a month, if they don’t see value, we don’t want to take their money or waste our time.”
The political world offers countless examples of this same principle. Leaders who choose to be honest about the complexity of issues rather than providing simplistic soundbites may face harsher criticism upfront, but they also tend to build more durable trust. Engaging substantively, acknowledging trade-offs, being willing to admit uncertainty — these are all forms of vulnerability, but paradoxically, they often lead to greater influence.
