Sometimes, life is like a mousetrap

Sometimes, life is like a mousetrap: the first mouse gets crushed, and the second (or third or fourth) mouse gets the cheese.

— from Takeoff Into Chaos · Friction Project : How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Har

In the book

Children, strangely, are the natural masters of this; it is we grown pilots who have forgotten how, we who are afraid. Life is sometimes like a mousetrap — the first mouse is crushed, and the second or third one gets the cheese — and the whole art is learning not to be paralyzed by the fact that the snapping is real. A great deal of what feels like a personal curse is simply the arithmetic of randomness. — Takeoff Into Chaos

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