clifp
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
- Joined
- Oct 27, 2006
- Messages
- 7,733
One of the more interesting neighbors I had at one time was a working psychologist, and we had a lot of interesting conversations over the backyard fence. Being ever-curious at the weird things I saw people do at work I had a seemingly endless supply of stories and questions to go with them.
At one point she asked "Has it ever occurred to you to just take off to the other side of the country to live there, no plans, except to just see what turns up?"
I said "No, of course not. That would be like putting my life in a bottle and throwing it in the ocean."
She said "Yes, and you might land on a nice warm beach."
"And I might also get smashed on the rocks. I will not leave that to chance."
She went on to say that huge numbers of people will do just that - head out, not knowing exactly, precisely, where they're going or what they're going to do when they get there, but convinced that "there" is better than "here".
To most on this board I would think that would be, to put it mildly, a strange thing to do. But apparently large numbers of people do exactly that.
That's a very interesting insight. Yet the forum is fillled with people who aren't afraid of risks. A number of members have flown high performance military aircraft and helicopters, or spent months under the sea living next
nuclear reactors and enough nuclear weapons to devastate a country. Plenty of folks, have lived overseas, or worked for companies with risky prospects.
The vast majority of us have invested in risky financial assets and held them during turbulent times. A fair number of us have invested in individual companies, startup and perhaps riskiest of all starting our business.
So are we just the lucky ones or did we plan better?