Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race "looking out for its best interests," as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief.*

Steve Jobs: "People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.

Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction, and is magnified by attempts to satisfy it—books have a secret mission and ability to multiply, as everyone who has wall-to-wall bookshelves knows well.

Believe me, it is tough to deal with the social consequences of the appearance of continuous failure. We are social animals; hell is other people.

Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.

that if you need something urgently done, give the task to the busiest (or second busiest) person in the office.

I suspect the I.Q., SAT, and school grades are tests designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order to call each other intelligent...Smart and wise people who score low on IQ tests, or patently intellectually defective ones, like the former U.S. president George W. Bush, who score high on them (130), are testing the test and not the reverse.

Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions.

We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurrence of monstrous proportions.

You know you have influence when people start noticing your absence more than the presence of others.

Avoidance of boredom is the only worthy mode of action. Life otherwise is not worth living.)

By all means, avoid words—threats, complaints, justification, narratives, reframing, attempts to win arguments, supplications; avoid words!

You need a story to displace a story.

The four most influential moderns: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and (the productive) Einstein were scholars but not academics. It has always been hard to do genuine - and no perishable - work within institutions

Suckers think that you cure greed with money, addiction with substances, expert problems with experts, banking with bankers, economics with economists, and debt crises with debt spending

You do not want to win an argument. You want to win.

You can afford to be compassionate, lax, and courteous if, once in a while, when it is least expected of you, but completely justified, you sue someone, or savage an enemy, just to show that you can walk the walk.

Don't tell me what you think, tell me what you have in your portfolio.

A good book gets better at the second reading. A great book at the third. Any book not worth rereading isn't worth reading.

Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain. You are hence fragile.

much of what other people know isn't worth knowing.

Start by being nice to every person you meet. But if someone tries to exercise power over you, exercise power over him.

A Stoic is a Buddhist with attitude, one who says "f*** you" to fate.

This idea that in order to make a decision you need to focus on the consequences (which you can know) rather than the probability (which you can't know) is the central idea of uncertainty.