A Catchphrase

Saturday was planned as a skip day, then Sunday I went to write down what I was thinking, and it turned into a giant rant about relationships. In the end, I decided that putting a fairly in-depth analysis of how I felt about every girl I've ever had feelings for on the Internet next to my real name was pretty damn stupid. So that's what happened to yesterday's possibility. (Trust me, it was best for all of us.)

Today I want to talk about something incredibly important: catchphrases. I am quite completely certain that no character or persona can be a complete, wholly formed individual without a witty saying to fall back on in times of trouble. After all, from the soothing “May the Force be with you” to the fantastically badass “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die” to the still-needs-work “I've got a Ph. D. in Horribleness!” this is a key component of anyone awesome, or trying to be.

Now, this could devolve into an overly-philosophical rant about the dangers of trying to reduce personal philosophy to a one-word slogan. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've already written one of those. This story is cooler, though. This story begins with me playing D&D. On the wrong level of a multi-leveled theater, desperately needing to pursue an escaping villain, my (squishy, unathletic) wizard could have jumped down, hoping he'd land. He could have also walked down the stairs and hoped his teammates could keep pace. But I uttered the momentous words that would grow to define my crusade for unbridled arrogance: “Fortune favors the bold, right?” I passed the roll, and it quickly became a running joke at our gaming group. Given a chance to make a decision, where the risky option was properly awesome, I'd take the risky option, declaring that fortune favors the bold. I eventually made a character with that as his entire point. He died twice in the first three sessions, but that didn't matter. It was awesome.

You can't explore that sort of roleplaying concept, and mention it so frequently, without at some point exporting those characteristics to your real life, or considering them if nothing else. (I'm sure someone could take this out of context and cite it for some twisted Jack Chick-esque purpose. Please don't, though.) I started saying it out of context. I started using it to justify things that I wouldn't have done otherwise. I started taking more risks. You know what? It was awesome. I had a lot of fun.

The more I think about it, the more I think that this can apply on far broader scales than just frivolous decisions or the roll of a d20. I make this argument based on probability. Consider your standard Gaussian bell curve. The more trials you run, the more likely your results are to fit that curve. That said, the values on either side—extremely good or extremely bad—are unlikely to occur in any given trial. Only through the accumulated weight of a number of trials gives you spots at the edge of the bell curve.

So I prefer to take more risks, because that's the only way to accumulate actual “successes.” Obviously, you get more failures this way, too. I think that's an acceptable way to live life, though. Better to have, so to speak, a lot of data points. Most of them won't work out right. Most of them will, honestly, be pretty average. A small sliver will royally suck. But for every really awful experience is a counterbalancing awesome one. And the thing about the awful ones, the places where you screwed up, is that if you're smart, you can avoid that again—you can try to shift your curve slowly towards the more positive end of the spectrum, if you're lucky. And even if you can't, at least you get some sort of curve. If you're not taking chances, your life doesn't have any shape at all. And that's just a waste.

I like to imagine that fortune favors the bold; I also think it's completely true. Fortune, that is, in the sense of the way the world tends to deliver opportunities and success. You can't succeed if you don't try. Fortune yields her benefits only to those who allow her—and that certainly requires boldness.