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.
When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.
Remember that you are a Black Swan.
Banking is a very treacherous business because you don’t realize it is risky until it is too late. It is like calm waters that deliver huge storms.
What I learned on my own I still remember.
Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone.
The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free.
You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.
If you hear a “prominent” economist using the word ‘equilibrium,’ or ‘normal distribution,’ do not argue with him; just ignore him, or try to put a rat down his shirt.