Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The number of managers with great track records in a given market depends far more on the number of people who started in the investment business (in place of going to dental school), rather than on their ability to produce profits.Collection: School
Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words 'impossible', 'never', 'too difficult' too often, drop him or her from your social network.Collection: Motivational
Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking.Collection: Running
Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyoneCollection: Hurt
I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.Collection: World
In economic life and history more generally, just about everything of consequence comes from black swans; ordinary events have paltry effects in the long term.Collection: Swans
Umberto Eco is the owner of a large personal library of almost 30,000 books that he has not read. [To him] read books are far less valuable than unread ones.Collection: Book
Paul Krugman is a danger to society!Collection: Danger
There are secrets to our world that only practice can reveal, and no opinion or analysis will ever capture in full.Collection: Our World
In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporationsCollection: Country
The irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.Collection: Thinking
Just as being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant toward the nice, being accommodating toward anyone committing a nefarious action condones it.Collection: Nice
Never think that lack of variability is stability. Don't confuse lack of volatility with stability, ever.Collection: Thinking
Simplicity is not so simple to attain.Collection: Simple
You want to favor systems that benefit from error, disorder, variability and things like that. You want to favor these systems and unfortunately, when - there's something I call the Soviet Illusion. The more the government becomes intrusive, the more things have to follow a script, and it can't handle this kind of system.Collection: Errors
The best philosophers were not academics, but had another job, so their philosophy was not corrupted by careerism.Collection: Jobs
Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act - if you can't control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.Collection: Behaviour
Stoicism is about the *domestication* of emotions, not their elimination.Collection: Emotion
Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that.Collection: Next
Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.Collection: Leadership
We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order. [...] We take what we know a little too seriously.Collection: Knowledge
Many people keep deploring the low level of formal education in the United states (as defined by, say, math grades). Yet these fail to realize that the new comes from here and gets imitated elsewhere. And it is not thanks to universities, which obviously claim a lot more credit than their accomplishments warrant. Like Britain in the Industrial Revolution, America's asset is, simply, risk taking and the use of optionality, this remarkable ability to engage in rational forms fo trial and error, with no comparative shame in failing again, starting again, and repeating failure.Collection: Math
Remember that you are a Black Swan.Collection: Swans
If my detractors knew me better they would hate me even more.Collection: Hate
The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind's flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality - without exploiting them for fun and profitCollection: Fun
I'm a private intellectual, not a public one.Collection: Intellectual
Switzerland is the perfect place where you have volatility at a municipal level that nothing up top - small units competing with each other.Collection: Perfect
You have family-owned businesses that have been around for 500 years. You cannot name a corporation that survives intact for even a few decades.Collection: Years
What kills me makes others stronger.Collection: Stronger
Any system that is deprived of its natural volatility, with government up (unintelligible) volatile, any system becomes very fragile.Collection: Government
Character is proportionate to N, the number of consecutive failures without being discouraged, or equivalently, the number of successive rejections without being intimidated.Collection: Character
Also, it's good to have more than one profession, in case your own profession goes out of style. A Wall Street trader who's also a belly dancer will do a lot better than a trader who winds up driving a taxi.Collection: Wall
Further, in writing, I feel corrupt and unethical if I have to look up a subject in a library as part of the writing itself. This acts as a filter--it is the only filter. If the subject is not interesting enough for me to look it up independently, for my own curiosity or purposes, and I have not done so before, then I should not be writing about it at all, period. It does not mean that libraries (physical and virtual) are not acceptable; it means that they should not be the source of any idea.Collection: Writing
Much of the research into humans' risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave.Collection: Risk
It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one.Collection: Ignorance
It's harder to say 'no' when you really mean it.Collection: Mean
I'm a capitalist but one who is smallist and localist, and who favours businesses where owners are still in charge.Collection: Favour
Deficits are like putting dynamite in the hands of children. They can get out of control very quickly.Collection: Children
Randomness works well in search sometimes better than humans.Collection: Sometimes
It was obvious that their profits were simply cash borrowed from destiny with some random payback time.Collection: Destiny
I don't read the papers; I stopped reading the papers. I read the papers only during periods of crisis, and I think papers are too long on a regular day and too short days when we have a crisis.Collection: Reading
Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.Collection: Matter
The payoff of a human venture is, in general, inversely proportional to what it is expected to be.Collection: Venture
Using, as an excuse, others' failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.Collection: Common Sense
Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments (which they do not control).Collection: Anxiety
We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.Collection: Tangible
Aesthetics, ethics, and many good things in humans are contagious.Collection: Ethics
Another definition of modernity: conversations can be more and more completely reconstructed with clips from other conversations taking place at the same time on the planet.Collection: Definitions
It is also naïve empiricism to provide, in support of some argument, series of eloquent confirmatory quotes by dead authorities. By searching, you can always find someone who made a well-sounding statement that confirms your point of view and, on every topic, it is possible to find another dead thinker who said the exact opposite.Collection: Views