Portfolio Life .net

…In my experience successful risk takers are not overly preoccupied with making mistakes. They learn and move on. They are also individuals who are willing to admit when they are wrong….

Most importantly, these are people who minimize the downside and focus on what could go right. They are relentlessly upbeat problem solvers. To succeed in business - and in social media environments - today, one has to be made of this cloth. It’s not just about resiliency and endurance - it’s about flexibility and adaptability. These are qualities that will also serve organizations well….

Risk is not a Four-Letter Word, Valeria Maltoni

I’d say the real risk is being blind to being wrong.
One antidote is the focus on what could go right and recognizing when the evidence doesn’t support the hope of that focus.

Hat-tip to Conversation Agent (go see the image there)

“The moment of truth,
the sudden emergence of a new insight, is an act of intuition.
Such intuitions give the appearance of miraculous flushes, or short-circuits of reasoning.
In fact they may be likened to an immersed chain,
of which only the beginning and the end are visible above the surface of consciousness.
The diver vanishes at one end of the chain and comes up at the other end, guided by invisible links.”

[Arthur Koestler, British novelist, journalist]

This is, after all, how we constructively create - paying attention to the nearly invisible.

For example, Six Rules Doctors Need to Know
Rule 1: They don’t want to be at your office.
Rule 2: They have a reason to be at your office.

…On every visit I try to identify the real reason (or the real fear) that brings them to see me. I don’t end the visit until I have addressed that reason.

Rule 3: They feel what they feel….

The blog Money, Matter, and More Musings has a post The Sandwiched Generation.
It begins with:

A few days ago, CBS Evening News ran an article titled “Caregivers Rise to the Challenge” which featured some families that were struggling to keep up with taking care of their aged parents (in terms of time and money)….

Then the commentary:

People who are struggling to maintain their own financial well being, in addition to looking after their parents and their kids, are what I call the “sandwiched generation”.

Notice the sort-of-treadmill effect in the above example? Stacy doesn’t have anything saved for her retirement - which effectively means that her children will probably have to spend their savings towards her post-retirement well being - which very likely means that they will probably have less for themselves in future. It’s an interesting cycle (played out all too well in most developing countries) - one which will not come to an end unless one of the generations takes the additional pains of providing for their parents as well as their kids.

continues…

I guess we would all ask these questions to ourselves at some point of time - whether our parents are in a good financial position or not. With what intensity you ponder over these question probably depends on your culture, temperament, and your personal relations with your parents, but most of you will think about this for sure.

It is an issue that tends to sneak up on most of us. Our parents are independent and our kids becoming so. It is a hard line to think about how you backfill for either.
I helped the younger as best I could.
Now turn to the older… less about finances than health and social support.
They are outliving their friends. A whole different type of sandwich.

A couple of days ago I watched Nova’s TV program on epigenetics -

Our lifestyles and environment can change the way our genes are expressed, leading even identical twins to become distinct as they age.

Epigenetics (wikipedia):

Epigenetics is a term in biology used today to refer to features such as chromatin and DNA modifications that are stable over rounds of cell division but do not involve changes in the underlying DNA sequence of the organism.[1] These epigenetic changes play a role in the process of cellular differentiation, allowing cells to stably maintain different characteristics despite containing the same genomic material. Epigenetic features are inherited when cells divide despite a lack of change in the DNA sequence itself and, although most of these features are considered dynamic over the course of development in multicellular organisms, some epigenetic features show transgenerational inheritance and are inherited from one generation to the next.

That was one of the more fascinating aspects - how the environment of the grandparent at key points in their maturation affected the health of the grandchildren.

The program is online. Click the link in the first sentence of this post.