DON'T Mess With The Mattress Tag

💻BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH

A few weeks ago my laptop decided it didn't want to connect to wifi anymore.😭

Blood pressure rising. 🌡️

I'm usually strangely good at fixing things like that. 🔧

This time was different. After doing a bunch of things that didn't work - I resigned myself to the nuclear option: reset the whole laptop to factory default settings. 💥 KA-BOOM!💥

THAT worked!! 🏆 Victory again for Eric! It took a few minutes to reinstall some software and enter some passwords 🔑, and in the end, not too bad.

⚠️ DANGER WILL ROBINSON, DANGER!

All seemed pretty much back to normal. Then, after a day or so, I started to get notices like this:

I remembered, "oh right💡  - that's software that came pre-installed on my computer." I had taken it off a while ago because I have other virus software I like better. 🛡️ However, because I reset to factory settings - it was back!

Not a huge deal; pretty easy to uninstall the stuff I don't want (and get rid of the pop-up notices). However, I haven't done it yet. So now, every few days, I get a scary warning that pops up. They give me 2 choices: sign up for their plan 📝 or "ACCEPT THE RISK" ⚔️ to get the notice to go away.

Here's what I'm noticing - it feels REALLY good to press "ACCEPT THE RISK" 💪. So good, in fact, that I've held off on uninstalling anything. I'm hoping I'll keep getting those pop-up messages so I can keep smashing the "ACCEPT THE RISK" 💥button.

🚫🏊NO SWIMMING WITHIN 30 MINUTES OF EATING 

From the time we're kids, we get so many messages about the virtues of avoiding risk. Don't jaywalk 🚶‍♂️, get insurance 🏥...avoid bacon 🥓.

Does it make sense to needlessly put oneself in true harm's way? Of course not. 🙅‍♀️

On the other hand, where there's a clear upside and potentially little, if any, downside - risk can be FUN 🎢. Our bias towards loss-aversion often makes us drastically overestimate the downside while drastically underestimating the upside. Too much risk aversion makes us miss out on a lot 🚀.

💃 TAKE A CHANCE AND DANCE

Any reminders you can give yourself to regularly seek out and accept a little more risk than feels comfortable, especially with situations that feel risky and really aren't, can lead to great things ✨.

You can even use risk to help make decisions. Given a choice between something that feels totally safe 🛋️ and the thing that feels a little risky 🎯, choose the latter. Because the safe thing is almost never as safe, and the risky thing is rarely as risky, as it seems.

🎲 May The Odds Be Ever In Your Favor! Eric