The above risk management advice is good - I'll add to it that in general you should distinguish two kinds of risk: risks that you can mitigate with some effort and risks totally out of your control. Taking on the former category of risks is known as investment, taking on the latter category of risks is known as speculation or gambling. Unfortunately, telling them apart is not trivial in many cases, but it helps to ponder the matter.
Diversification is one means of mitigating risks (related to failure of individual investments), and it takes little effort. Value investing (and frugality as a kind of it) is another way, which requires you to get informed about market prices and estimate the actual values of assets (easy to do when comparing e.g. prices/quality of everyday products, not so easy with more complicated or unique items such as real estate, also very difficult when comparing prices/quality of companies because of armies of competing analysts that affect the prices). Finally, there is this old-fashioned thing of becoming a seasoned professional in some field: this is the best way to effectively personally mitigate risks and be rewarded for it with high income - because other, clueless people will gladly pay for your superior risk-reducing skills (your only concerns will be education, insurance and other, competing professionals).
That's one reason why doctors get high pay - they understand the risks for their patients and they know how to reduce them. Same goes for engineers, of course. A financial adviser's highest risk, same as quack's, would be his clients figuring out that he is in reality unable to provide any risk-reducing service for them and instead ripping them off with fees. His skill consists in a large part of the ability to conceal this fact...