Get Fired with Enthusiasm

Moving to Bath has been one of the most courageous things we have ever done and so far we are loving every minute of it. We haven’t just moved house but have moved our whole lives down here and that means our business as well. When we started to tell people about the intended move the responses varied from “are you mad” to” well done and good luck” and a few varieties beyond that but with more expletives on the end. Answering those comments initially made us think and on a few occasions tested our own understanding as to WHY we were doing it. It wasn’t long before we came up with a joint reasoning and after a bit of practice it began to sound like an elevator pitch or mission statement. I know a lot of people still think we are a “BIT MAD” but can understand our motives behind it.

Riskometer - I thought this was a word that I had just invented (eat your heart out Peter Andre) But alas it was Dr Frank Duckworth of the Royal Statistical Society (who with Tony Lewis invented the cricket scoring system now in use in Britain) He knew that people found it extremely difficult to judge relative risks. So at the RSS annual conference he presented a scale, similar to the Richter scale for earthquakes, designed to make the risk of various activities more obvious. This has been described as a riskometer, a term which has been independently invented by several people down the years in other contexts. Level 0 in the scale is safety, at least to the extent of surviving for a year; you reach Level 8 by playing Russian Roulette with every chamber of the gun filled (a dead certainty, as you might say). What he didn’t allow for was the inability of people to understand the logarithmic scale involved (thus making Level 4, for example, seem too close to Level 6); nor did he expect vilification from so many women, who pointed out that most of his examples were male activities such as rock-climbing or deep-sea fishing (At the risk of seeming sexist, I must say that he did provide some estimates of household chores, such as dying while washing up or vacuuming—these have a risk factor of 5.5.) So that’s why I don’t like washing up but love mowing the lawn with our new “sit on mower”

I digress, so it leaves me to explain that my risk level is about 6 and for an example starting our business, Matchsticks 6 years ago, would sit comfortably at an 8 but the flip side of this should be the REWARDOMETER. That’s got to be a new word! So in essence “be enthusiastic and get fired” meaning “get fired up” but not at the expense of losing your job, though if you do because the reward is greater then, please, give me a call and an up to date resume and I will rise to the challenge.

Emma Hackforth

www.matchsticks.biz

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