There are systems that use failure as fuel for improvement, where the cost of failure is small. Nassim Nicholas Taleb More Quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb More Quotes From Nassim Nicholas Taleb Umberto Eco is the owner of a large personal library of almost 30,000 books that he has not read. [To him] read books are far less valuable than unread ones. Nassim Nicholas Taleb library owners book You want to favor systems that benefit from error, disorder, variability and things like that. You want to favor these systems and unfortunately, when - there's something I call the Soviet Illusion. The more the government becomes intrusive, the more things have to follow a script, and it can't handle this kind of system. Nassim Nicholas Taleb benefits errors government By all means, avoid words—threats, complaints, justification, narratives, reframing, attempts to win arguments, supplications; avoid words! Nassim Nicholas Taleb narrative winning mean We learn the most from fools ... yet we pay them back with the worst ingratitude. Nassim Nicholas Taleb fool worst pay An ad hominem attack against an individual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message. Nassim Nicholas Taleb intelligent doe ideas Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act - if you can't control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word. Nassim Nicholas Taleb behaviour outcomes lasts Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them. Nassim Nicholas Taleb senior leadership people You don't become completely free by just avoiding being a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master. Nassim Nicholas Taleb slave becoming needs Wittgenstein's ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler's reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler. Nassim Nicholas Taleb reliability use may Never think that lack of variability is stability. Don't confuse lack of volatility with stability, ever. Nassim Nicholas Taleb volatility stability thinking People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels - people you don't want to resemble when you grow up Nassim Nicholas Taleb good-life growing-up people Simplicity is not so simple to attain. Nassim Nicholas Taleb simplicity simple What I learned on my own I still remember Nassim Nicholas Taleb my-own stills remember Being an entrepreneur is an existential, not just a financial thing. Nassim Nicholas Taleb existential entrepreneur financial You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness. Nassim Nicholas Taleb pseudo embrace order At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control. Nassim Nicholas Taleb exposure no-point risk The best philosophers were not academics, but had another job, so their philosophy was not corrupted by careerism. Nassim Nicholas Taleb philosopher jobs philosophy There is a certain category of fool-the overeducated, the academic, the journalist, the newspaper reader, the mechanistic scientist, the pseudo-empiricist, those endowed with what I call epistemic arrogance, this wonderful ability to discount what they did not see, the unobserved. Nassim Nicholas Taleb pseudo fool arrogance There is no effective difference between guessing a variable that is not random, but for which information is partial or deficient, and a random one. In this sense, guessing (what I don't know, but what someone else may know) and predicting (what has not taken place yet) are the same thing. Nassim Nicholas Taleb variables differences taken Don't aim to be perfect! Aim to be antifragile Nassim Nicholas Taleb aim perfect
