Quotes About Risk

researchers have found again and again that people act as though losses are from two to four times more painful than gains are pleasurable.

There are a little more than 50 million people in England, and around 50 deaths each day via accidental causes (slipping in the tub; being swept away in a flooding river; falling from a ladder). The daily risk of dying there in an accident is roughly 1 in a million. Your risk of dying unexpectedly in England on any given day is the same as your odds of having to guess which date someone is thinking of between 500 BC and August 1, 2200.

the fourth villain of decision making is overconfidence. People think they know more than they do about how the future will unfold.

In purchasing a piggy, you're basically paying $10 in hopes of protecting $22 in spare change from your own hands. Life is full of these piggy-bank situations

What tires out the Rider—and puts change efforts at risk—is ambiguity

Or you could focus on the Path, in which case you would disregard hearts and minds entirely. In fact, suppose you stipulated outright that your workers are hopeless, that they're irredeemable daredevils who are determined to waggle their fingers in the machine's danger zone for the sheer sport of it. Could you still keep them from dismembering themselves?

On the first day of class, the Visual Arts building reclined before me like an old brick whore, egging me to show her one, last, good time. I doubted I was up to the task, but regardless, I entered from the rear, just to give myself the slightest mental edge.

Invite your customer to take risks in the pursuit of inspired innovation, and be your customer's net when they step onto that high wire.

Loving someone so deeply was dangerous. It made you too vulnerable.

the confidence of the untested.

I learned a new fact about love that day: it could kill. Sometimes it could kill instantaneously.

For the first time I admit I am giving myself to love. Not the worship I offered the Old One, not the awe I felt for the spices. But human love, all tangled up, at once giving and demanding and pouting and ardent. It frightens me, the risk of it. And I see that the risk lies not in what I always feared, the anger of the spices, their desertion. The true risk is that I will somehow lose this love.

entrepreneurship has meant either setting up a corner grocery shop or some other sort of modest local business or, more rarely, a total pie-in-the-sky crapshoot around an idea that is more likely to bring ruination than riches.

it is better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it. And even if your state allows open carry, keep your gun concealed. If you wear it openly, it is like having a target on your back; you will be the first to be shot.

No one said living isn't a pretty chancy business, Sibyl. No one gets out of here alive.

No guts, no story.

What others may perceive as a gamble, leaders understand to be merely a calculated risk. In the face of superior odds, a leader must have the courage to innovate.

Leadership begins and ends with hunger. The hunger of an individual to risk his or her own personal comfort and affluence and attack the status quo is not only the initiation of leadership but also its sustaining force.

There are countries of the world, and regions of one's own mind, where it is unwise to travel.

He stepped on the unexploded artillery shell, and it tore him apart.

The idea that Sophie could die had always been there, ever since the first diagnosis, and yet it seemed like a bad place on a map, an Ivory Coast, somewhere not urgently frightening because fear itself kept you away from the place. You thought of it as somewhere braver people went, or at least as somewhere you'd have plenty of time to pack your bags for.

Beware the short terminal guy with nothing to lose.

It's easy to find surface goals and stakes (to save the word, to stop the bad guy, save a life), but you often find that those aren't deep enough to help you create the plot. You run out of problems for the protagonist to tackle pretty quickly. The trick is to find the personal stakes and then work from there to determine the goals. People act when they want to (something to gain) or have to (something to lose).   Personal

I decided to make 'Captain America' because I realized I wasn't doing the film because it terrified me. You can't make decisions based on fear.