Posted by
Scruffy_Scirocco on Monday, October 06, 2008 1:35:03 AM
Occasionally over the last couple of years, I would sound off on this or that discussion board. Writing is easy for me, and I have been known to have a humble opinion from time to time. Sometimes, people would feed back to me that I should write for a living.
Well, I can't say I didn't enjoy those ego boosts, but it seemed like a lot of trouble, and who the heck really wants to hear my opinion, anyway? I mean, opinions are like assholes, everyone has one, and they generally stink.
But over the last week, one friend of mine really started pestering me, and well, here I am. But she's not going to get off that easily, because I've made her a co-author! I envision the format of this to be questions and feedback from her to start things rolling, and then a free-form give and take from there. We'll see how it goes, and hopefully it will be entertaining, and maybe informative.
I call this blog Calculated Risk, because that's what life is. Everything you do in life is a calculated risk, and people live their lives weighing whether the upside of any decision warrants the potential downside.
Should I have dinner? Upside: I'll satisfy my hunger. Downside: I might get food poisoning. Given that my wife is an excellent cook, I deem this to be an acceptable risk/reward equation, and I eat.
How about dessert? Upside: Yummy! Downside: Fat gut. Given that I just spent an uncomfortable summer in near constant hunger to rid myself of 25 lbs of unwanted me, I think this is an unacceptable risk/reward. No dessert.
Most of the time in life the risk/reward calculation is so obvious that we don't even realize we're doing it. But when it really matters, if we don't apply that logic the results can be, well, less than optimal.
The implication of this is that you are ultimately responsible for everything that happens to you. You took the risk, you deemed the risk of a undesirable result was negligible enough to warrant the decision. If it backfired on you, regardless of how negligible the risk was originally, the fault is yours.