Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We grossly overestimate the length of the effect of misfortune on our lives. You think that the loss of your fortune or current position will be devastating, but you are probably wrong. More likely, you will adapt to anything, as you probably did after past misfortunes.

Primitive societies are largely free of cardiovascular disease, cancer, dental cavities, economic theories, lounge music, and other modern ailments.

Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.

How much you truly "believe" in something can be manifested only through what you are willing to risk for it.

More data means more information, but it also means more false information.

Finally, when young people who "want to help mankind" come to me asking, "What should I do? I want to reduce poverty, save the world," and similar noble aspirations at the macro-level, my suggestion is: 1) Never engage in virtue signaling; 2) Never engage in rent-seeking; 3) You must start a business. Put yourself on the line, start a business.

never trust the words of a man who is not free.

My lesson from Soros is to start every meeting at my boutique by convincing everyone that we are a bunch of idiots who know nothing and are mistake-prone, but happen to be endowed with the rare privilege of knowing it.

We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.

Since procrastination is a message from our natural willpower via low motivation, the cure is changing the environment, or one's profession, by selecting one in which one does not have to fight one's impulses. Few can grasp the logical consequence that, instead, one should lead a life in which procrastination is good, as a naturalistic-risk-based form of decision making.

Beware of the person who gives advice, telling you that a certain action on your part is "good for you" while it is also good for him, while the harm to you doesn't directly affect him.

The next time someone pesters you with unneeded advice, gently remind him of the fate of the monk whom Ivan the Terrible put to death for delivering uninvited (and moralizing) advice. It works as a short-term cure.

When things go our way we reject the lack of certainty.

Scars signal skin in the game.

Entrepreneurs are heroes in our society. They fail for the rest of us.

The epiphany I had in my career in randomness came when I understood that I was not intelligent enough, nor strong enough, to even try to fight my emotions.

Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind.

it is only when you don't care about your reputation that you tend to have a good one.

They agree that chess training only improves chess skills but disagree that classroom training (almost) only improves classroom skills.

Books to me are not expanded journal articles, but reading experiences, and the academics who tend to read in order to cite in their writing--rather than read for enjoyment, curiosity, or simply because they like to read--tend to be frustrated when they can't rapidly scan the text and summarize it in one sentence that connects it to some existing discourse in which they have been involved.

We humans are the victims of an asymmetry in the perception of random events. We attribute our successes to our skills, and our failures to external events outside our control, namely to randomness.

Alexander said that it was preferable to have an army of sheep led by a lion than an army of lions led by a sheep.

Every social association that is not face-to-face is injurious to your health

It is no secret that large corporations prefer people with families; those with downside risk are easier to own, particularly when they are choking under a large mortgage.