I never thought of the CEO angle (not sure what that says about my intelligence, but hopefully it says something good about my morals). I know that my thinking

I never thought of the CEO angle (not sure what that says about my intelligence, but hopefully it says something good about my morals). I know that my thinking as a 10 year old was that if I got caught robbing a bank, my mom wouldn't have been bothered that I tried to rob a bank, she'd have been bothered that I _failed_. As an adult I realize that she'd not have been happy in either case. (I think. Probably.) But it was exactly that shift of thinking from "should I do this" (prone to peer pressure) to "is the payoff worth the risk" (which leads to "what is the risk?") that kept me from doing anything particularly stupid and why I brought the story up in relation to the article. As adults we normally relate "should I do this" to "what is the payoff" and "what is the risk". As a preteen/teen the life experiences to encourage those connections aren't there, so the decisions will be different from the average adults'. This crazy advice (my mother doesn't remember making it, so it was probably an off-the-cuff attempt at humor that altered my life) created a temporary bridge between those concepts until I had the experiences to build my own bridges. In retrospect it's actually similar to how certain religious doctrines provide reasons for moral decisions when you wouldn't necessarily have those morals on your own. mindblown.