[salad77]

When I was SCUBA training, my instructor made a point of telling everyone in the class :

"There are OLD divers and there are BOLD divers, but there are very few OLD, BOLD divers."

Every single time I had an issue under water, it was when I was trying something BOLD and it brought back the instructors words.

Martyn Farr's book [mentioned in other comments] is littered with examples of BOLD divers but when you look up to see what they're doing now, many of them are dead. Normally related to a cave incident.

[Baeocystin]

Those exact same words (with rider replacing diver) were the first ones uttered to me by my Motorcycle Safety Instructor when I first took the course back in the the 90's. He was an ex-CHP officer with ~1 million miles under his belt, and had a lot of stories, gruesome and glorious.

It was a great class, and he was a wonderful teacher. Scared the foolhardy, sobered the romantics, and conveyed a career's worth of lessons on riding safe. I've been accident-free since starting in '94, and I genuinely do think a large part of it was his initial, excellent instruction.