I always bookmarked this wonderful article by The Economist about Chuck Yeager, the first pilot who broke the sound barrier: “He was in firm control of what was right around him, and what he couldn’t control, such as the enemy, or the outcome, or death, was not worth worrying about. He was too busy.”
The insight here is that there is a difference between “size of risk” and “size of cushion around the risk.”
We can make very risky activities tolerable by building larger cushions around them: for example, people who BASE-jump because they have practiced it so much, or skydive instructors who have dived thousands of times.
Don’t measure the risk; measure the cushion around the risk. (And be busy with controlling that.)
Tim Ferriss below has the same reminder in different words:
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