The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.
To succeed in life requires a total inability to do anything that makes you uncomfortable when you look at yourself in the mirror.
Anything that provides you with very, very stable income, very stable conditions, maybe generally stable, that often, it masks real risks, risks of blow-ups.
Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking.
The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination.
Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it.
It is much harder to become independent if you are wealthy than to become wealthy if you are independent.
Most people are sceptical about the wrong things and gullible about the wrong things.
The best philosophers were not academics, but had another job, so their philosophy was not corrupted by careerism.
Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.
The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference.
People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels – people you don’t want to resemble when you grow up.
Never, never, never think – that’s one lesson you should have in life. Never think that lack of variability is stability.
If you are in banking and lending, surprise outcomes are likely to be negative for you.
The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history.
We glorify those who left their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent. We humans are not just a superficial race – we are a very unfair one.
Simplicity is not so simple to attain.
Suckers think that you cure greed with money, addiction with substances, expert problems with experts, banking with bankers, economics with economists, and debt crises with debt spending.
Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.
Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn’t finish college. Too much emphasis is placed on formal education – I told my children not to worry about their grades but to enjoy learning.