Quotes About Adaptability

Successful people make decisions quickly (as soon as all the facts are available) and change them very slowly (if ever). Unsuccessful people make decisions very slowly, and change them often and quickly.

entirely. When a merchant finds that a certain line of merchandise is not selling, he usually supplants it with another that is in demand. The person whose business is that of marketing personal services must also be an efficient merchant. If his services do not bring adequate returns in one occupation, he must change to another, where broader opportunities are available.

Successful people make decisions quickly (as soon as all the facts are available) and firmly. Unsuccessful people make decisions slowly, and they change them often.

Rational flâneur (or just flâneur): Someone who, unlike a tourist, makes a decision opportunistically at every step to revise his schedule (or his destination) so he can imbibe things based on new information obtained. In research and entrepreneurship, being a flâneur is called "looking for optionality.

The only valid political system is one that can handle an imbecile in power without suffering from it.

Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories.

understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit.

Heuristics are simplified rules of thumb that make things simple and easy to implement. But their main advantage is that the user knows that they are not perfect, just expedient, and is therefore less fooled by their powers. They become dangerous when we forget that.

Don't look for the precise and local. Simply; do not be narrow minded.

it so happens that America is currently far, far more creative than these nations of museumgoers and equation solvers. It is also far more tolerant of bottom-up tinkering and undirected trial and error. And

A mild degree of unpredictability in your behavior can help you to protect yourself in situations of conflict. Say

Once in a while you encounter members of the human species with so much intellectual superiority that they can change their minds effortlessly.

Beware of precise plans by governments. As

Options like dispersion of outcomes and don't care about the average too much.

I have no problem with risk taking, just please, please, do not call yourself conservative and act superior to other businesses who are not as vulnerable to Black Swans.

La pequeño es hermoso en muchos otros aspectos. Quedémonos, por ahora, con que lo pequeño (como agregado, es decir, como conjunto de unidades pequeñas) es más antifrágil que lo grande: en realidad, lo grande está condenado a caer, una propiedad matemática que explicaré más adelante y que, por desgracia, parece ser universal porque se aplica a las grandes empresas, a los grandes mamíferos y a las grandes administraciones.

They thought out of the box, like traders, except much better and without fear of introspection.

cualquier cosa atrapada en la planificación tiende a fracasar, precisamente, a causa de estos atributos: es un mito que la planificación ayude a las grandes empresas porque, como hemos visto, el mundo es demasiado aleatorio e imprevisible para basar una política en la visibilidad del futuro. Lo que sobrevive surge de la interacción entre la adaptabilidad y algunas condiciones del entorno.

because we take what we know a little too seriously.

Je préférerais être bête et antifragile qu'extrêmement intelligent et fragile, à n'importe quel moment.

parties are great for optionality).

it makes them much less dependent on economic forecasts. This allowed them to shrug off later crises.2

I'd rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.

The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory, we are not likely to change our minds—so those who delay developing their theories are better off.