Alright, when I'm super stuck on a question, sometimes I will play this game or when I have

a friend or somebody I love stuck on a question, we're talking about it and gaming it out

for them.

I'll play this little game that I call maximum basement, maximum ceiling.

We start by considering option A and we think what is the very best thing that has any

reasonable chance of happening and what is the very worst thing that has any reasonable

chance of happening and then we work our way back toward the middle, we're like what's

probably the most likely positive-ish outcome and what's the most likely negative-ish outcome?

You kind of develop this profile, this almost bell curve and you can kind of look at the

shape of that bell curve mentally when you're done working over one option really well

and then once you kind of got that in your mind, you go and you run the other option,

maximum awesome, maximum awful, most likely positive-ish outcome, most likely negative-ish outcome

and you can almost chart that in your brain on another bell curve and then it gets real

simple because at some point you realize that if you pick say option A, almost certainly

nothing really that good is very likely to happen, you're likely to pick up some very

modest gains but you are putting into play something catastrophic that doesn't come into

play if you choose say option B where the worst thing that could happen is say you lose

a little face, you burn a little time, you burn a little money but there are a lot of

good things that could come out of it as well.

Sometimes we just get a little too close to the math problem, that's a phrase that one

of my friends uses all the time for when we're not running the equation very carefully

and we just been mulling over and stewing on it for too long, we're letting emotion get

...