Margie Warrell: A Very Brief Summary

Margie Warrell explains how as a culture we don’t take enough risks. We do this because our modus operandi is to catastrophize and predict things will go wrong even though we often overestimate the risks. She also states that we expect things to be worse than they would be if they do turn out badly because our brains are wired to do so. Often we are pessimistic of our own abilities and so we expect we will be unable to cope with the consequences, thus we try to avoid risk so we don’t have to worry about needing to fix things in the aftermath. While overplaying the risks of doing something we downplay the risks of following the status quo—we try to persuade ourselves that it is better than taking the risk even if the status quo is sub-par.

In reality if something is bad and nothing is done it will just get worse. To overcome our fear of risk we need to examine why we are afraid and how our lives would change if we became courageous. As a final note Warrell re-emphasizes the fact that we are more capable than we think and that history has proven that timid people fail more often than brave people.