Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words 'impossible', 'never', 'too difficult' too often, drop him or her from your social network. Nassim Nicholas Taleb More Quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb More Quotes From Nassim Nicholas Taleb You want failures to be small and informational. Silicon Valley does very well. It knows how to use failure as a tool for improvement. Nassim Nicholas Taleb valleystoolsdoe What fools call "wasting time" is most often the best investment. Nassim Nicholas Taleb wasting-timeinvestmentfool If you sat with a pencil and jotted down all the decisions you've taken in the past week, or, if you could, over your lifetime, you would realize that almost all of them have had asymmetric payoff, with one side carrying a larger consequence than the other. You decide principally based on fragility, not probability. Or to rephrase, You decide principally based on fragility, not so much on True/False. Nassim Nicholas Taleb takendecisionpast Failure saves lives. In the airline industry, every time a plane crashes the probability of the next crash is lowered by that. Nassim Nicholas Taleb save-a-lifecrashnext To bankrupt a fool, give him information. Nassim Nicholas Taleb foolinformationgiving If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry. Nassim Nicholas Taleb annoyingpoetrywant Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market alow you to put there. Nassim Nicholas Taleb realbookknowledge What America does best is produce the ability to accept failure. Nassim Nicholas Taleb acceptingdoeamerica Many people keep deploring the low level of formal education in the United states (as defined by, say, math grades). Yet these fail to realize that the new comes from here and gets imitated elsewhere. And it is not thanks to universities, which obviously claim a lot more credit than their accomplishments warrant. Like Britain in the Industrial Revolution, America's asset is, simply, risk taking and the use of optionality, this remarkable ability to engage in rational forms fo trial and error, with no comparative shame in failing again, starting again, and repeating failure. Nassim Nicholas Taleb errorsmathamerica The person you are most afraid to contradict is yourself. Nassim Nicholas Taleb persons For the robust, an error is information. Nassim Nicholas Taleb robustinformationerrors The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments. Nassim Nicholas Taleb ornamentsweaknessshows Don't ask the barber whether you need a haircut, and don't ask an academic if what he does is relevant. Nassim Nicholas Taleb ignorancedoeknowledge Paul Krugman is a danger to society! Nassim Nicholas Taleb danger A country's assets reside in the tinkerers, the hobbyists, and the risk-takers. Nassim Nicholas Taleb assetsriskcountry 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 Nassim Nicholas Taleb doctorsdifferencessimple The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination Nassim Nicholas Taleb academicgeniusimagination If one puts an infinite number of monkeys in front of typewriters, and lets them clap away, there is a certainty that one of them will come out with an exact version of the 'Iliad.' Nassim Nicholas Taleb typewriterseducationnumbers When an investor focuses on short-term investments, he or she is observing the variability of the portfolio, not the returns - in short, being fooled by randomness. Nassim Nicholas Taleb portfoliosinvestingreturn Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer. Nassim Nicholas Taleb modernityethicslaw
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