Life & Wisdom Quote by Roger von Oech

Calling it a "risk muscle" is a neat rhetorical hack: it smuggles courage out of the realm of personality and into the realm of practice. Roger von Oech, a creativity writer best known for making innovation feel like something you can train rather than something you’re born with, borrows the body’s most persuasive logic. Muscles respond to reps. They weaken with neglect. No moral sermon required, just physiology as metaphor. The subtext is quietly anti-romantic: you don’t wait for inspiration, you condition yourself for uncertainty.

The line also reframes risk as a daily hygiene routine, not a heroic leap. "At least once a day" lowers the bar in a way that’s strategically disarming. He’s not asking you to quit your job or move to Lisbon; he’s asking you to send the email, pitch the idea, take the class, speak up in the meeting. That scale matters. It treats bravery like a system of small behaviors that accumulate, which is exactly how creativity tends to work in real life: iterative, slightly uncomfortable, mostly unglamorous.

There’s a gentle threat inside the metaphor, too. "Atrophies" implies that playing it safe isn’t neutral; it’s decay. Comfort becomes not a reward but a slow disability. In a culture that sells optimization and routines, von Oech’s genius is to make risk feel like self-maintenance. If you can be guilted into steps and protein, why not into novelty and rejection? The intent is practical: normalize trying, normalize failing, keep the mechanism oiled.