Steve Jobs is a genius at creating what neuroscientists call an "emotionally charged event," which is the equivalent of a mental post-it note that tells the brain, Remember this! At Macworld 2007, when unveiling the iPod, Jobs could have opened his presentation by telling the audience that Apple was launching a new mobile phone that also played music, games, and video.

Do you ever let your kid ride a bike to a friend’s house? Walk alone to school? Take a bus, solo? Or are you thinking about it? If you are, then in America at least you would be regarded as a freak. When Leonore Skenazy, a columnist with the New York Sun, wrote a column called: “Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Take The Subway Alone" in mid-2008, she figured she would get a few e-mails pro and con. Two days later, she and her son appeared on the Today Show, MSNBC, FoxNews and all manner of talk radio, and under her amiling face was the title: “America’s Worst Mom?”

Several books ago, I started work on a manuscript called: Control yourself! 99 ways to keep your head when all about you are losing theirs (and blaming it on you). The reference, of course, is to the famous line from Rudyard Kipling’s “If.” Most of us are fundamentally good, hardworking, decent human beings who wish others well. We are eager to get on with the business of life, we wish no harm to anyone, and we don’t accept that it is necessary to tread over other people in order to develop and grow. But there is a toxic minority who are neither good nor decent. They do not wish us well. They see us as a barrier to their development. They have a vested interest in badmouthing us.

Somewhere near you is a killer. A killer you’ve never noticed as a killer or even as a real danger to you. This is not an invisible killer, like a virus or bacterium. It is not an obvious killer, like the idiot in the 4x4 roaring down the road outside. It’s plainly visible, a familiar part of everyday life, never given a second’s thought, even though it kills more than 1,000 people in the UK every single year. With road deaths causing fewer than 3,000 deaths a year, this killer is between a third and a half as dangerous as all the road traffic in the UK. And the name of this killer: stairs. Stairs are an example of how civilians don’t understand risk. But according to British journalist and novelist John Lanchester in Whoops - Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay, moneymen don’t understand risk either. The bankers made inaccurate calculations about the mathematics of risk. They thought they had engineered risk out of existence. That mistake destroyed banks, forced others into public ownership, put taxpayers on the hook for hundreds of billions of pounds and brought the world financial system to a juddering, panicky standstill.

Whenever I hear of an example of misunderstanding, I am always reminded of the politically incorrect but oh so funny punchline of a joke about a Chinese guy who is walking along one day with his Jewish friend. The Jew suddenly slugs the Chinese man. "What was that for?" asks the Chinese man. “That was for Pearl Harbor!" "Pearl Harbor?” complains the Chinese man, “that was the Japanese. I'm Chinese." "Chinese, Japanese, what's the difference?" says his friend. They continue walking in silence, when the Chinese man suddenly punches the Jew in the face. “What's that all about?" the Jew asks. “That was for the Titanic!" "The Titanic? That was an iceberg!" protests the Jew. "Iceberg, Goldberg, what's the difference?"