Quotes About Outcome

Remember that nobody accepts randomness in his own success, only his failure

blame his successor for subsequent results.

No single observation can meaningfully affect the aggregate.

Just as those who live by the sword die by the sword, those who earn their living taking risks will lose their livelihood taking risks.

the truth came out eventually, and his mission ended up paying off, with some delay.

The longer we had to wait for it, the more severe it would be.

It's much easier to sell "Look what I did for you" than "Look what I avoided for you.

So what counts is the payoff from success.

it took seven years to make John a hero and just seven days to make him a failure.

If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don't take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing.

You were wrong for years, right for a moment, losing small, winning big, so vastly more successful than the other way

yet people do it out of the foolish risk-taking trait that pushes us to jump into such adventures blinded by the outcome.

It does not matter how frequently something succeeds if failure is too costly to bear.

There are some risks we just cannot afford to take. And there are other risks (of the type academics shun) that we cannot afford to not take.

Universal behavior is great on paper, disastrous in practice.

Nobody accepts randomness in his own success, only in his failure.

So the antifragile can lose for a long time with impunity, so long as he happens to be right once; for the fragile, a single loss can be terminal.

Risk and ruin are different tings.

Imagine what might have happened had you not missed your train

Given that it was not predictable, you are not to blame.

How frequent the profit is irrelevant; it is the magnitude of the outcome that counts.

90 percent of all options expire as losses.

There is actually a law in statistics called the law of iterated expectations, which I outline here in its strong form: if I expect to expect something at some date in the future, then I already expect that something at present.

One needs to go out and buy a lottery ticket in order to win. Does it mean that the work involved in the trip to the store caused the winning?