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You can pay for a risk you never take. One email cost me a month of dread and thirty minutes of work, Kodak buried a working digital camera to protect film, and Blockbuster laughed off a fifty million dollar Netflix. Standing still is its own bet, and usually the expensive one.
Show Notes
You can pay for a risk you never take. One email cost me a month of dread and thirty minutes of work, Kodak buried a working digital camera to protect film, and Blockbuster laughed off a fifty million dollar Netflix. Standing still is its own bet, and usually the expensive one.
Featuring: Mark Zuckerberg, Erica Jong, Harvey Cox, Steve Sasson, Octavia Butler
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"And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more."
Erica Jong
You can pay for a risk you never take. One email cost me a month of dread and thirty minutes of work.
It sat in my inbox while I imagined what was waiting inside.
Each day I chose another day of low-grade dread over a few minutes of discomfort. The unknown was the scary part. When I finally opened the email, the unknown shrank to a small, known task and the dread was gone before I hit send.
A $100 bill hidden under a mattress feels safe. The bill sits still and buys a little less each year. Hide one in 2000 and it buys about half of what it bought then.
In 1975 a Kodak engineer named Steve Sasson built the first digital camera. Management looked at it and said: "That's cute, but don't tell anyone about it." Film made the money and film felt safe, so the digital camera sat shelved for twenty years.
Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012.
Netflix's founders flew to Dallas in 2000 and offered Blockbuster the whole company for $50 million. Blockbuster ran thousands of stores. Netflix mailed DVDs from a website. The CEO struggled not to laugh and Blockbuster stayed put.
It filed for bankruptcy in 2010.
Standing still feels safe. The bet underneath: prices hold, the market doesn't change.
"The only lasting truth," Octavia Butler wrote, "is Change." Standing still is a different type of risk: the type you take without choosing it. Of course, "not to decide is to decide," as the theologian Harvey Cox wrote.
The movie Friday put the same idea in different words back in 1995. Craig's father catches stray dogs for a living and wants Craig, fresh off losing his job, to apply. Craig tells him he ain't trying to be no dog catcher. His father fires back:
"If you ain't got nothing on the table, you ain't gotta worry about catching a dog. You gotta worry about a dog catching your ass."
To keep a dog from catching my ass, I run courage challenges each day: one act that takes nerve.
- The sales ask
- The hard conversation I've been ducking
- Pushing a run further than I've tried before
I chase risk before it can chase me.
Taking no risk is taking a risk. One you choose by not choosing.
What's one move you could make before the world makes it for you?
- Email scene: shape from context.md (weekly, June 7-13 2026): a check-in sat undone ~a month, ~30 minutes of actual work, anxiety dropped sharply once started. Rendered as an email per Dru's instruction this round ("same shape but email"). The month, the thirty minutes and the anxiety-drop are the sourced facts.
- Courage challenge practice: posts/published/4-things-id-tell-my-younger-self-one-changed-everything.md ("one act a day that takes nerve" + the ducked-conversation examples).
- Kodak: Sasson prototype Dec 1975; management quote per Sasson's account (PetaPixel, Wikipedia); patented, shelved ~20 years to protect film; Chapter 11 filed Jan 19, 2012 (IPWatchdog, Wikipedia).
- Blockbuster: bios/reed-hastings.md (Dallas, $50M, 2000, Antioco struggled not to laugh, bankruptcy 2010). Apollo-13-late-fee founding story deliberately NOT used (bio flags it as likely invented). "Thousands of stores" is the widely documented scale circa 2000.
- Inflation: $100 in 2000 ≈ $194.61 in 2026 CPI (usinflationcalculator/in2013dollars), so the hidden bill buys about half.
- Cox quote: "Not to decide is to decide," Harvey Cox, from "On Not Leaving It to the Snake" (1967); attribution carried in the Library of Congress Respectfully Quoted (Bartleby). Interpolated per Dru's bracket note 2026-07-14. Alternative considered: Rush's "Freewill" lyric "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice" (1980), held back in favor of the tighter Cox line.
- Butler quote: "The only lasting truth / Is Change." from the central Earthseed verse, Parable of the Sower (1993); verified via Wikipedia (Earthseed + Parable of the Sower articles) 2026-07-15. Interpolated per Dru's bracket note ("I'm thinking of octavia butler here").
- Run bullet ("Pushing a run further than I've tried before"): Dru's own phrasing from his 2026-07-18 bracket note, replacing "The pitch a group might turn down" (flagged as a duplicate of the sales ask). Bullets sorted shortest to longest per his typography rule (2026-07-18). The prior pitch bullet came from posts/published/4-things-id-tell-my-younger-self-one-changed-everything.md.
- Experiments sentence removed 2026-07-15 per Dru's note (experiments-vs-courage-challenges distinction deferred; seeded to posts/sparks/experiments-vs-courage-challenges.md).
- Friday quote: Willie Jones (John Witherspoon) to Craig, Friday (1995); wording per IMDb quotes page + getyarn.io/clip.cafe clip family, verified 2026-07-18. Added per Dru's voice note this session ("humorous, culturally specific moment... you don't have to worry about taking risks, risk gonna take you"). GIF placeholder comment sits beside the quote for Dru's post-publish backfill in WordPress. Transition back into the courage challenges re-enters through the quote's dog image per Dru's 2026-07-18 note, reworded per his "you don't have to take this verbatim"; he also stripped the joke-signposting from the setup line himself ("different words," 2026-07-18).
- Chase line after the bullets ("I chase risk before it can chase me"): Dru's own framing from his 2026-07-18 bracket note ("I'm chasing risk before it can chase me is the point... if you don't chase it, [it] will chase you"); both-beats option chosen per his "mention both" lead. The risk-as-pursuer personification is deliberate thesis framing.
- Unknown-vs-known payoff (line 14): Dru's direction via 2026-07-18 bracket note ("the unknown being scarier than the known"); wording is the exact option he selected in session. Lovecraft's "the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown" (Supernatural Horror in Literature, 1927; verified via hplovecraft.com) was offered as an interpolated quote and declined in favor of plain words.
- Turkey-problem trio (travel agents, video clerks, taxi medallions): already published in why-comfort-will-ruin-your-life-the-turkey-problem.md; video clerks would double the Blockbuster beat.
- Maginot Line (France's safest wall, 1940): strong but a domain jump; post already carries four stories.
- Vanguard vs active managers (Helmer's counter-positioning canon): finance-heavy beside the mattress example.