I'm known to be a gambler by my friends, and more often than not I manage to drag friends into doing things that are totally irresponsible, especially with money. Besides the rush you get from just being in it, it can pay off ridiculous returns when you're right. The payoffs are usually big enough where you don't even have to be right half the time to come out ahead.
Even then, people have called me "reckless", "foolish", "an idiot", "ghetto" (??), etc. I admit to being a risk-taker, but then everything in life is essentially a bet governed by some esoteric probability. I'm a gambler where I think I understand the probabilities, which is usually in sports or the market or energy commodities. We're all betting on something when we step out of the door in the morning, even if we all bet on different things. It's not just your career, it's your personal life, your health, your happiness, whatever. Games like poker, sportsbetting, and the market are probably some of the easiest things to get a handle on, probability-wise.
I'm reminded of a story that I heard about a statistics professor, who one day walked into his classroom and asked the following question: if you could make a bet in which the good outcome was everything you had ever dreamed of immediately becoming a reality and the bad outcome was instant, painless death, how much of a chance of success would you have to have to take the bet?
The professor's take: on good days I'm about 99.9%, on bad days more like 90%.
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