Hanging on my office wall is a digital print on metal of a little girl with a paintbrush facing down a giant rhino whose toenails she has painted fuchsia. In black silhouette, the girl looks like a cross between a Banksy image and the Fearless Girl statue on Wall Street.
The creative process must begin with originality, imagination and risk taking, but many describing themselves as creative focus more on the ‘ideas’ part of the equation than on any end product.
The impact of the pandemic on risk choices is particularly important when it comes to the future of work –both the immediate issue of workplace safety as people start returning to their offices and longer-term changes in the kinds of jobs people are going to do.
we need to talk about the way that current U.S. tax policies treat risks by subsidizing dangerous risk-taking while failing to invest in heading off others.
Each one of us has a risk personality that is as distinct as a fingerprint. Our risk fingerprints start with our underlying personality traits, which you might think of as the ridges, arches, loops, and whorls that give the fingerprint structure and make it distinctive. Our experiences alter the fingerprint much as a cut might leave a scar. Just as a real fingerprint offers forensic analysts clues to identity, the risk fingerprint offers a window into who each of us is: how we feel about authority and power, about our sense of human agency, how we relate to each other in groups, and broader cultural differences that can make societies particularly risk sensitive or risk blind. It sheds light on what people hope and fear—and why—and how much power they feel they and their leaders have over the world around them.
As thrilling as it is to see a new book being “born” it’s also a bit terrifying for authors to release our ideas into the world. Will people “get” what we’re talking about? Will they disagree? Will they find an error that went uncaught? Worst of all, will they decide not to pay attention at all? It’s risky to invite readers to embrace and adapt an idea, because they sometimes mean it in ways we’d prefer them not to.
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