Quotes About Chance

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

Probability and expectation are not the same. Its probability and probability times the pay off.

Luck is the grand equalizer.

It is as if the mission of modernity was to squeeze every drop of variability and randomness out of life— with the ironic result of making the world a lot more unpredictable, as if the goddesses of chance wanted to have the last word.

Imagine a speck of dust next to a planet a billion times the size of the earth. The speck of dust represents the odds in favor of your being born; the huge planet would be the odds against it. So stop sweating the small stuff. Don't be like the ingrate who got a castle as a present and worried about the mildew in the bathroom. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth—remember that you are a Black Swan.

The only article Lady Fortuna has no control over is your behavior. Good luck.

I know that history is going to be dominated by an improbable event, I just don't know what that event will be.

There is asymmetry. Those who die do so very early in the game, while those who live go on living very long. Whenever there is asymmetry in outcomes, the average survival has nothing to do with the median survival.

This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is risky, that it is a bad thing—and that eliminating randomness is done by eliminating randomness.

You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.

Seize any opportunity or anything that looks like opportunity.

Not everything that happens happens for a reason, but everything that survives survives for a reason.

our world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown, and the very improbable (improbable according our current knowledge)—and all the while we spend our time engaged in small talk, focusing on the known, and the repeated. This

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. Much

Assume that you live in a town with two hospitals—one large, the other small. On a given day 60 percent of those born in one of the two hospitals are boys. Which hospital is it likely to be?

Luck favors the prepared," Pasteur said

The market is like a large movie theater with a small door.

Black Swans and tail events run the socioeconomic world

In practice, randomness is fundamentally incomplete information.

I know that history will be dominated by an improbable event, I just don't know what that event will be.

considering that alternative outcomes could have taken place, that the world could have been different, is the core of probabilistic thinking.

Further, being fooled by randomness is that in most circumstances fraught with a high degree of randomness, one cannot really tell if a successful person has skills, or if a person with skills will succeed—but we can pretty much predict the negative, that a person totally devoid of skills will eventually fail.

Of course chance favors the prepared! Hard work, showing up on time, wearing a clean (preferably white) shirt, using deodorant, and some such conventional things contribute to success—they are certainly necessary but may be insufficient as they do not cause success.

You are a lucky man; you presented in such a comprehensive way the effect of chance on society and the overestimation of cause and effect. You show how stupid we are to systematically try to explain skills.