It seems that it is the most unsuccessful people who give the most advice, particularly for writing and financial matters.
My dream – the solution – is that we would have a National Entrepreneur Day, with the following message: Most of you will fail, disrespected, impoverished, but we are grateful for the risks you are taking and the sacrifices you are making for the sake of the economic growth of the planet and pulling others out of poverty. You are at the source of our antifragility. Our nation thanks you.
Sometimes people ask you a question with their eyes begging you to not tell them the truth.
One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.” Statistics stay silent in us.
It is much more immoral to claim virtue without fully living with its direct consequences.
The only article Lady Fortuna has no control over is your behavior. Good luck.
Organisms need, to use the metaphor of Marcus Aurelius, to turn obstacles into fuel – just as fire does.
Unless you are perfectly narcissistic and psychopathic – even then – your worst-case scenario is never limited to the loss of only your life.
But never engage in detailed overexplanations of why something is important: one debases a principle by endlessly justifying it.
To understand how something works, figure out how to break it.
Don’t complain too loud about wrongs done you; you may give ideas to your less imaginative enemies.
Some people are only funny when they try to be serious.
My experience is that money and transactions purify relations; ideas and abstract matters like “recognition” and “credit” warp them, creating an atmosphere of perpetual rivalry.
Technology is the result of antifragility, exploited by risk-takers in the form of tinkering and trial and error, with nerd-driven design confined to the backstage.
In other words, history teaches us to avoid the brand of naive empiricism that consists of learning from casual historical facts.
If you ever do have to heed a forecast, keep in mind that its accuracy degrades rapidly as you extend it through time.
Almost everything in social life is produced by rare but consequential shocks and jumps; all the while almost everything studied about social life focuses on the “normal,” particularly with “bell curve” methods of inference that tell you close to nothing. Why? Because the bell curve ignores large deviations, cannot handle them, yet makes us confident that we have tamed uncertainty. Its nickname in this book is GIF, Great Intellectual Fraud.
Missing a train is only painful if you run after it.
People overvalue their knowledge and underestimate the probability of their being wrong.
So I disagree with the followers of Marx and and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or “incentives” for skill. The strategy is, then, to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many Black Swan opportunities as you can.