Terry O'Reilly

So very true.

Every banana republic knows it's one brave idea away from collapse.

It also holds true for entrepreneurs and marketers who revolutionize their industries with ideas that can't be ignored.

Brass also quotes James Fallows, who writes for The Atlantic.

Fallows was talking about the fact we are all really bad at differentiating fear from danger.

We're scared of flying, but we have no problem whipping down the highway at 110 kilometers per hour, even though you're 86 times more likely to die in a car accident than a plane crash.

The odds of dying in a plane crash are 1 in 10,000, three times less likely than choking on food.

We are afraid of sharks, but not of bathtubs, yet one person dies in a bathtub incident every day.

Sharks only claim one per year on average.

Therefore, Fallow says, bathtubs are 365 times as frightening as sharks.

And that's the problem we all have differentiating between fear and danger.

We're more relaxed around things we're more acquainted with, like bathtubs.

Shark encounters are so rare, it turns them into mysteries, which in turn becomes uncertainty, which ripens into fear.

And we fill that gap in our knowledge with worst-case scenarios.

All of which means we should have Bathtub Week on the Discovery Channel, not Shark Week.

My latest book is titled Against the Grain, subtitled Defiant Giants Who Changed the World.

I write about people who had a great idea but were dismissed by superiors, ridiculed by colleagues, mocked by competitors, and in many cases, these brave people lost their reputations, their jobs, and their livelihoods.

Some came close to losing their sanity.

But in every single case, their idea was right and revolutionary.

One of those people was Ignace Semmelweis.