My philosophy of life is that if we make up our mind what we are going to make of our lives, then work hard toward that goal, we never lose - somehow we win out. ↗
I come from a family of cops, and all of them share that understanding that they put their lives on the line. They share and deal with that sense of risk every day, so I got to see that up close. ↗
What emerged, of course, was that the magnitude scale presupposed that all earthquakes were alike except for a constant scaling factor. And this proved to be closer to the truth than we expected. ↗