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Your innovating requires you to be more alert regarding what you can do about what you think you know and don’t know. So, the notion of risk as hit or miss is limiting. But what really matters is how well you’re prepared to handle uncertainty. That depends largely on whether you have banked your future on a single thing being true or whether your ideas is robust and ready to survive changes. Show a learning path through a space of opportunity that reduces everyone’s tolerance for uncertainty and that explains how you intend to trade off certainty and risk as you scale up so you do not fail because of something you could have predicted and/or been prepared to ready. Remember, there is no risk at the outset; when risk enters the picture is largely a matter of scale. And if you absolutely must fail, make it come as a surprise to you and everyone, so everyone cherishes what is learned.

Mature readers always reach beyond the text they are reading. They know unconsciously how to interact with print, regularly uncovering new meanings and making inferential leaps that connect with other thoughts, id s, or experiences. As you saw in the last chapter's discussion of inference, a piece of writing almost always means more than it says, and the awake reader constantly fleshes out suggestions, nuances, and implications to enrich the reading experience. In this and the next chapter, I want to talk with you about some high-order inference skills: predicting outcomes, drawing conclusions, and generalizing. These three skills work together because they involve the reader's ability to follow a trail begun but not completed by the words on the page. The three skills all relate to inferential reasoning in that they require readers to evolve meanings derived from the prose. Remember our definition of inference? When we infer, we uncover information that is unstated—hidden, if you will. The information expands upon the writer's words. Using what the writer tells us, we plug into the complex circuitry of ideas by adducing what's not exactly stated in what we're reading. We dig out meanings, shaping and expanding the writers ideas. Predicting, concluding, and generalizing move us toward wider and deeper meanings in what we read. Let's take them up one at a time. An engaged reader regularly looks ahead to what will happen next—what will be the next event in a chronological sequence, what will be the next point in a logical progression, what will be the next thread in the analytic fabric the writer is weaving. We base our predictions on prior events or issues in the narrative or analytical sequence. Making correct predictions involves our ability to see causes and effects, stimuli and results, actions and consequences. Your child already knows how to predict outcomes. Right from her earliest days in the crib, she has used important analytical skills instinctively.