Scary vs Dangerous
Hey everyone,
I’ve been reading the How I Built This book this week, and I found an interesting takeaway. For those that don’t know, HIBT is an entrepreneurship podcast, and host Guy Raz has compiled the stories into a book.
Anyway, the second chapter is all about the concept of things that are dangerous as opposed to just scary. Something dangerous but not scary would be shopping for groceries during the pandemic without a mask—familiar, so not scary, but nonetheless threatening to your health. Something scary but not dangerous would be, for example, leaving your steady 9-5 job to focus on your startup.
The point is that we often confuse the two. The examples in the book are specifically about entrepreneurship, but I think they apply to many areas of life. I, for one, am taking the entrepreneurship stories to heart (which, I guess is the point of the book).
Should you act on something which seems dangerous but is only scary?
Pete’s Picks ✅
Strategy: We’ve had a lot of car travel the past few weeks, and I’ve really enjoyed downloading Netflix episodes onto my iPad for the trips. Highly recommend if you can swing it.
Series: I’m a huge fan of House, M.D. and medical mysteries in general, so I was fired up to see the series Diagnosis come to Netflix. Based on a popular NYT column, doctor Lisa Sanders (who consulted on House) helps find answers to mysterious illnesses, in part through writing and crowdsourcing.
Cheers,
Peter