It’s common for more women to be embarrassed about making a mistake, they don’t want to mess up on Twitter, they have this fear of public failure. Male clients on the other hand, even when they’re insecure about something, are usually like “I don’t care.” But when they’re insecure about something, they say stuff like, “I don’t have time” or “that’s silly.

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

Viruses are invisible, pitiless, ferocious, proven mass killers. The 1918 flu epidemic dispatched over 20 million people. Another such epidemic is expected before too long, and because communications have improved so much, it could be much more devastating. Yet Contagion is far less likely to be eliciting shrieks at your local multiplex than Paranormal Activity 3.

On the face of it, this constitutes a malfunction of humanity’s self-defence mechanism. Of course, when our instincts were taking shape we weren’t to know we should be worrying about pathogens rather than sabre-toothed tigers. Yet we’ve learned to frighten ourselves with plenty of new bugaboos, from terrorists to paedophiles, which don’t begin to match the threat we face from flu.

How much in support of a short-term goal have you screwed yourself in the long-term, because now you can’t maintain that? … I would encourage anybody, if you’re listening and you’re thinking about adopting a CMS you have to think about that as a user experience problem and not as a technology problem.

I’ve said it many times before: risk-averse studios owned by large corporations are killing US movie culture. Tyrannical studio heads and narrow-minded executives terrified of losing their jobs will always “take a punt” on superstar film-makers like Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, James Cameron and Ridley Scott. … But there is no studio that’s willing to consistently gamble on engaging storytelling. Instead they focus on the bottom line and try to anchor their businesses in bankable sequels, prequels and remakes.

Only those
who will risk going too far
can possibly find out
how far they can go.

If we were not intimately familiar with our own Texting behavior, we might think that it’s insane to think that anyone would knowingly increase their chances of dying 10 fold rather than waiting a few minutes to check email, but this is the reality.

Society benefits from people with the charm, joy in the moment, monomaniacal dedication and lack of interest in self-preservation that seem to make for a shorter life. We don’t all need to make old bones.

In The Lover’s Dictionary, David Levithan shows that real romance is all about risk, the risk of two people extending themselves toward each other with love and fear and uncertainty in the hope of something good.

Nobody takes risks anymore. Nobody young jumps and tries totally new things, because it’s almost surely a noble way to suicide your career.

Fascinating stuff. But the biases produce the reverse effect when it comes to movie-plot threats. The more you think about far-fetched terrorism possibilities, the more outlandish and scary they become, and the less control you think you have. This causes us to overestimate the risks.