Welcome back to the 1st Law Newsletter - Friday Edition.

In this email:

• Questions lead to success

• How to understand risk

• Quote Purpose

Ask well and you shall receive in abundance

Your ability to ask great questions is a driving factor determining the level of both your professional and personal success. Why it's important to ask quality questions - the quality of your questions directly correlates to the quality of response you will receive. By asking better questions than your peers and colleagues you will receive higher quality information, and thus be able to make better decisions than them, propelling your growth and trajectory in life.

How to improve the quality of your questions:

• Before you ask the question, include solutions you have already tried, or information that you already know. This will qualify your questions as something that is worthy of answering, something that you have tried to figure out on your own, rather than a question that you've asked as soon as you ran into a problem instead of trying to solve it on your own. E.g.: "We did A and it resulted in B, but we were expecting C...." Or "I've tried X and looked into Y... ".

• Ask detailed questions. The more detail you provide in your question, the more specific the answer must be to satisfy the parameters that you have introduced. Also, providing more details is a great demonstration that you are serious about the topic and have done your research.

• Be specific about the kind of answer you are looking for. We have all heard the advice of keeping your questions open ended, and that is good advice.. sometimes. Open ended questions are great for continuing conversations, but when the primary goal is information, you need to drive the focus of the question in the direction of the answer you seek.

If you feel inclined to cement this idea, ask me a question incorporating these techniques in a reply to this email. The topic is your choice, although ideally I should know an answer...

The Two Components of Risk

As a society, I think we have a poor perception of the reality of what's truly risky and dangerous, versus the things we commonly villainize as dangerous. I recently read an interesting formula for how people perceive and respond to risk:

Risk = Hazard + Outrage

The technical and real component of risk is the hazard, while outrage is a response to the perceived risk. This can start to explain why things like terrorism, which undoubtedly could be terrible and deadly but is highly unlikely (at least in North America), is treated with such high priority, while a silent killer like heart disease is largely ignored. You are much more likely to die from heart disease than terrorism... but which do you see on the news more often? Which is more alarming when it happens? When was the last time you saw a warning about the dangers of junk food on the news?

Another example is guns and swimming pools. Would you rather have your child at a friends house who has a swimming pool or a gun in the house? Most likely the swimming pool... But the thing is that it is far more likely for kids to die from swimming pools than by guns, but the pool is silent and the gun is loud, leading to the mismatched outrage. It's difficult, but next time you are faced with a risk, try and adjust what you perceive to be the danger to the actual hazard.

Risk communication equation specifically belongs to Peter Sandman. Ideas from Freakonomics by Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt.

Quote I Want To Share

This is from Meditations, which is quite possibly my favorite book that I have ever read. Whenever I am feeling off-center or I am in a non-stoic state of mind, I come back to this book and just flip through the pages and read a couple lines . It never fails to ground me and help me refocus on what's important. To focus on what's in my control and not to blame others for my feelings. I think we all need reminders every so often that disturbances can only come within, and only if we let them. Our feelings are a result of our perceptions. Changing your perspective can improve your mood and state of mind.

Thanks for reading!

Lucas