Monday, September 16, 2013

Making it (not) happen

While I was cleaning some mold and dirt off of our doors and porch the other day, I found myself pondering a theme which recurs in my head pretty frequently:  the astonishing proportion of our time, effort, and $ that goes into trying to mitigate risk and make sure things don't happen. I kinda think this may be a book brewing.

Think about it, we're talking about:

  1. Insurance
  2. Health maintenance (exercise, fatty food avoidance, tooth brushing)
  3. Paint and cleaning, to a point
  4. Police
  5. National defense
  6. Regulation (seatbelts, airbags, lead paint
  7. and so on, and so on
At a certain point in time and process, all of these things fold over on themselves and stop being exercises in keeping the negative at bay and all of a sudden become just flat out productive of value.

It doesn't sound sexy, but with enough Grousing (and copious editing), it could become Gladwell or, even better, Atul Gawande like. I think I've done my statutory 10,000 hours of writing.

There is so much nominal focus on Making Things Happen, but making them not happen is a big part of the game.

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