Top 100 Nicholas Taleb Quotes
#1. The narrative fallacy, Bezos explained, was a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2007 book The Black Swan to describe how humans are biologically inclined to turn complex realities into soothing but oversimplified stories.
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#2. Something has worked in the past, until - well, it unexpectedly no longer does, and what we have learned from the past turns out to be at best irrelevant or false, at worst viciously misleading.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#3. What made medicine fool people for so long was that its successes were prominently displayed and its mistakes (literally) buried.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#4. Every time you use a coffeemaker for your morning cappuccino, you are benefiting from the fragility of the coffeemaking entrepreneur who failed. He failed in order to help put the superior merchandise on your kitchen counter.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#5. My lesson from Soros is to start every meeting at my boutique by convincing everyone that we are a bunch of idiots who know nothing and are mistake-prone, but happen to be endowed with the rare privilege of knowing it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#6. Evidence shows that we do much less thinking than we believe we do - except, of course, when we think about it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#7. it did not so much judge the quality of a trader's performance as encourage him to game the system by working for short-term profits at the expense of possible blowups - like
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#8. When you walk the walk, whether successful or not, you feel more indifferent and robust to people's opinion, freer, more real.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#9. follows: to understand the future to the point of being able to predict it, you need to incorporate elements from this future itself. If
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#10. In the past, only some of the males, but all of the females, were able to procreate. Equality is more natural for females.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#11. Only in recent history has "working hard" signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse and, mostly, sprezzatura .
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#13. Never ask a trader if he is profitable: you can easily see it in his gesture and gait.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#14. 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
#16. Writers are remembered for their best work, politicians for their worst mistakes, and businessmen are almost never remembered.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#17. We have managed to transfer religious belief into gullibility for whatever can masquerade as science.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb
#18. It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#19. Make sure that you are in a situation where the constant mistakes are small and can be used for something.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#20. Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#21. Psychologists have shown the irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#22. On the day when we are able to foresee inventions we will be living in a state where everything conceivable has been invented. Our
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#24. A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#25. The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#26. The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#27. Probability and expectation are not the same. Its probability and probability times the pay off.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#28. People often need to suspend their self-promotion, and have someone in their lives they do not need to impress. This explains dog ownership.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#31. People do not realize that the media is paid to get your attention. For a journalist, silence rarely surpasses any word.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#32. I have anecdotal evidence in my business that MBAs tend to blow up in financial markets, as they are trained to simplify matters a couple of steps beyond their requirement. (I beg the MBA reader not to take offense; I am myself the unhappy holder of the degree.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#33. wealth does not count so much into one's well-being as the route one uses to get to it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#35. 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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#39. Someone who says "I am busy" is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#40. The problem lies in the structure of our minds: we don't learn rules, just facts, and only facts.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#41. Some business bets in which one wins big but infrequently, yet loses small but frequently, are worth making if others are suckers for them and if you have the personal and intellectual stamina.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#42. As countries get rich they start increasing education and the very educated people tend to not like trial and error, because they think they're obligated to use the body of knowledge they have.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#43. The epiphany I had in my career in randomness came when I understood that I was not intelligent enough, nor strong enough, to even try to fight my emotions.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#44. This simple inability to remember not the true sequence of events but a reconstructed one will make history appear in hindsight to be far more explainable than it actually was - or is.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#45. Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#46. When some systems are stuck in a dangerous impasse, randomness and only randomness can unlock them and set them free.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#47. The author cites researcher David Howard's idea of post-traumatic growth. Howard contends that some individuals faced with a traumatic event actually develop new strength.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#49. Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope to, some day, find something to say.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#50. The traits I respect are erudition and the courage to stand up when half-men are afraid for their reputation. Any idiot can be intelligent.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#51. Know how to rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb
#52. Anything that provides you with very, very stable income, very stable conditions, maybe generally stable, that often, it masks real risks, risks of blow-ups.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#53. I disagree with the followers of Marx 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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#55. Just as in matters of seduction, people lend the most to those who need them the least.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#56. This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is risky, that it is a bad thing - and that eliminating randomness is done by eliminating randomness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#57. Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that's what you are seeking.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#59. Deficits are like putting dynamite in the hands of children. They can get out of control very quickly.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#60. We humans lack imagination, to the point of not even knowing what tomorrow's important things will look like.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#61. Poverty is clearly one source of emotional suffering, but there are others, like loneliness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#62. Two weekends in Philadelphia are not twice as pleasant as a single one - I've tried.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#63. The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory, we are not likely to change our minds ...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#65. This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#67. 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.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#70. Governments are wasting billions of dollars on attempting to predict events that are produced by interdependent systems and are therefore not statistically understandable at the individual level.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#71. Life would be unbearably bland if we had no enemies on whom to waste efforts and energy.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#73. You will get the most attention from those who hate you. No friend, no admirer and no partner will flatter you with as much curiosity.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#74. Let us return to the idea that universities generate wealth and the growth of useful knowledge in society. There is a causal illusion here; time to bust it.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#75. If you let markets - in general, my belief is that if you let markets give you information, they'll give you the information rather than artificially prop up everything.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#76. Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#77. A country's assets reside in the tinkerers, the hobbyists, and the risk-takers.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#78. When you beat up someone physically, you get excercise and stress relief; when you assault him verbally on the Internet, you just harm yourself.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#79. Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#80. Only the autodidacts are free. And not just in school matters - those who decommoditize, detouristify their lives.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#82. An elephant is vastly more efficient, metabolically, than a mouse. It's the same for a megacity as opposed to a village. But an elephant can break a leg very easily, whereas you can toss a mouse out of a window and it'll be fine. Size makes you fragile.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#83. You don't become completely free by just avoiding being a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#84. Loss of mental function, taste for Frank Sinatra music, and similar degenerative effects.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#85. The only article Lady Fortuna has no control over is your behavior. Good luck.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#86. True humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others; the rest is either shyness or good marketing
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#88. Things are always obvious after the fact. The civil servant was a very intelligent person, and this mistake is much more prevalent than one would think. It has to do with the way our mind handles historical information.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#89. Avoidance of boredom is the only worthy mode of action. Life otherwise is not worth living.)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#90. You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else's narrative.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#91. Author discussed what he calls the "narrative fallacy." This refers to our "limited ability" to look at a sequence of facts "without weaving an explanation into them.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb
#92. To become a successful philosopher king, it is much better to start as a king than as a philosopher,
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#93. my antidote to Black Swans is precisely to be noncommoditized in my thinking. But
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#94. The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#95. We favor the sensational and the extremely visible. This affects the way we judge heroes. There is little room in our consciousness for heroes who do not deliver visible results - or those heroes who focus on process rather than results.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#96. When we want to do something while unconsciously certain to fail, we seek advice so we can blame someone else for the failure.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#99. We humans are the victims of an asymmetry in the perception of random events. We attribute our successes to our skills, and our failures to external events outside our control, namely to randomness.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#100. No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we are at dominating the odds, randomness will have the last word.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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