CLOSING out the year, battered by news of yet another Greek tragedy unfolding in our world and the travel industry, I was determined to start 2022 on an optimistic note.
So I listened to an interview with Espen Fadnes, one of the world’s most famous base jumpers, who I think is the most optimistic human being on our planet. His sport, which has people dressing up like squirrels and jumping from cliffs, carries a 0.2-0.4% injury rate per jump, and a fatality rate of 0.04% per jump – that means around four deaths for every 10,000 jumps.
He’s jumped 8,000 times and in fact, the interviewer first spoke to him 10 years ago and said she was surprised that he was still alive, to which he replied that he believes he will live to 100.
He says he got his optimism from his father who himself climbed everything he could find – ice, rocks, you named it. “I’m exactly like him,” said Fadnes.
The only thing my father climbed was the chiku tree in our backyard, to get them before the bats did.
Fadnes is on the extreme spectrum of what is called optimism bias – defined in this study as “the difference between a person’s expectation and the outcome that follows” and it seems 80% of us have that bias. Ten percent are neutral and the other 10% pessimistic – they don’t work in the travel industry.
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