When you’re facing a risk/reward situation, you have to know your miss.

That is, if things go awry, how bad might it be?

Knowing your miss helps you to judge whether the risk is worthwhile. When we take a step back, we may find that we’re too worried — that we should just go for it. Other times, we may discover that we’re being reckless in what we’re planning to do.

But knowing our miss — our tendencies and our typical errors — helps in the calculation.

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If you’re like me, and you’ve recently tried to impress your kindergartener by kicking a soccer ball over a barn (and you didn’t consider that an errant kick would go thorough a split-rail fence, down a steep, snow-covered field, over a drop off, and toward a stream) then you’ve had twenty minutes of snow-trudging to consider risk/reward, and how one might learn from such experiences.