Switzerland is the perfect place where you have volatility at a municipal level that nothing up top – small units competing with each other.
Political life loves some volatility.
Make sure that you are in a situation where the constant mistakes are small and can be used for something.
You want failures to be small and informational. Silicon Valley does very well. It knows how to use failure as a tool for improvement.
Is the economy something organic or is it something engineered? I think it’s closer to the organic. You harm it by artificially suppressing volatility in it.
A washing machine needs constant maintenance. It doesn’t want any harm. It wants tranquility, and you need someone to – you’re not going to harm it by continuously monitoring it and adjusting it.
Anything organic requires some dose of variability so it can adapt all the time, and fixing things is not a good idea.
The bonus for bankers fragilizes the system. Someone has the upside at the expense of others.
The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder.
I’d rather have the market tell us what – I’d rather have events precipitate events, rather than just sit there like passive people in Washington.
People work out, they stress their body, and their body gets stronger from stress.
There are systems that use failure as fuel for improvement, where the cost of failure is small.
It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.
Difficulty is what wakes up the genius.
The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding, or better at explaining than doing.
The best way to verify that you are alive is by checking if you like variations. Remember that food would not have a taste if it weren’t for hunger; results are meaningless without effort, joy without sadness, convictions without uncertainty, and an ethical life isn’t so when stripped of personal risks.
What matters isn’t what a person has or doesn’t have; it is what he or she is afraid of losing.
Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions.
If you want to get an idea of a friend’s temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life.
We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurrence of monstrous proportions.