After focusing on the driving factors that cause us to avoid taking risks (our brains evolved to see failure as a life-or-death concern, which is clearly no longer the case for most “risks”), Godin ends with this nugget:
The cost of failure is not that a saber-toothed tiger eats you… the cost of failure is nothing. The worst thing that will happen is that you will fail and no one will notice.
The upshot: Rather than avoiding risks for fear of failure, go for it. Your brain can try telling you that you’re risking your life; you’re not.
…You just have to consider that your mind is an emergent, constantly active, fluid ecosystem, composed of many sub-personas, some of which carry a traceable memory of possible events, others carry modules, interacting modules, that manage these potential probabilities into semi-coherent wholes as immediacy requires.
