Report 008: The Price of Predictability Søren Kierkegaard: The Concept of Anxiety
Albert Bandura: Self-Efficacy
Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Antifragile
Viktor Frankl: Man’s Search for Meaning
> Connect the dots
● Safety removes more than danger: it also removes surprise, necessity and the occasions on which we discover what we can do. A perfectly predictable life protects us from many failures, but it also protects us from experiences that could have changed us.
● This is why courage rarely feels like courage beforehand. Before the journey, the conversation or the unfamiliar decision, the body often produces resistance precisely because it cannot simulate what comes next.
● The costs of taking a risk are easy to see because they arrive as events: rejection, embarrassment, loss or failure. The costs of avoiding risk accumulate almost invisibly as abilities never tested, relationships never formed and lives gradually narrowed around what already feels safe.
● We therefore make a peculiar error when we ask only what might happen if we act. Sometimes the greater risk is that nothing happens at all, because a life from which uncertainty has been removed may eventually become a life from which development has been removed with it.
● This is why courage rarely feels like courage beforehand. Before the journey, the conversation or the unfamiliar decision, the body often produces resistance precisely because it cannot simulate what comes next.
● The costs of taking a risk are easy to see because they arrive as events: rejection, embarrassment, loss or failure. The costs of avoiding risk accumulate almost invisibly as abilities never tested, relationships never formed and lives gradually narrowed around what already feels safe.
● We therefore make a peculiar error when we ask only what might happen if we act. Sometimes the greater risk is that nothing happens at all, because a life from which uncertainty has been removed may eventually become a life from which development has been removed with it.
Keep connecting the dots:
Albert Bandura: Self-Efficacy
Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Antifragile
Viktor Frankl: Man’s Search for Meaning
