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