Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb

You always control what you do; so make this your end.

the easier it was to make money.

Nero believes, draw people to focus on noise rather than the signal (the

do not try to predict precise Black Swans—it tends to make you more vulnerable to the ones you did not predict.

The hidden harm of fragility is that you need to be much, much better than random in your prediction and knowing where you are going, just to offset the negative effect.

the alternative would have been inconceivable.

Drogo is obsessed and blinded by the possibility of an unlikely event;

Remember that positive Black Swans have a necessary first step: you need to be exposed to them.

They were financially free, and secure, not because of their means but because of their lack of wants.

by exposing an idea in raw form, allows it to be judged by the public.

since the older we get, the less likely we are to live.

A life saved is a statistic; a person hurt is an anecdote. Statistics are invisible; anecdotes are salient. Likewise, the risk of a Black Swan is invisible.

Lúcio Aneu Sêneca foi um filósofo que por acaso era a pessoa mais abastada do Império Romano, em parte graças a sua esperteza comercial, em parte por ter atuado como conselheiro do extravagante imperador

the ultimate test of whether you like an author is if you've reread him)

When you become rich, the pain of losing your fortune exceeds the emotional gain of getting additional wealth, so you start living under continuous emotional threat.

Theory should stay independent from practice and vice versa—and we should not extract academic economists from their campuses and put them in positions of decision making.

The more uncertainty, the more role for optionality to kick in, and the more you will outperform.

first central assumption leading to the Gaussian bell curve fails in reality. In games, of course, past winnings are not supposed to translate into an increased probability of future gains—but not so in real life, which is why I worry about teaching probability from games. But when winning leads to more winning, you are far more likely to see forty wins in a row than with a proto-Gaussian.

Decentralization reduces large structural asymmetries.

Never cross a river if it is on average four feet deep

Nero was mindful of his health, spending at least an hour a day at the gym or in the pool.

possessions make us worry about downside, thus acting as a punishment as we depend on them.

a system that doesn't have a mechanism of skin in the game, with a buildup of imbalances, will eventually blow up and self-repair that way.

No amount of advertising will match the credibility of a genuine user.