Quotable Quotes--Nassim Nicholas Taleb Edition

A C.E.O.'s incentive is not to learn, because he's not paid on real value. He's paid on cosmetic value. So he's paid to be nice to the Merrill Lynch analysts or the Wall Street analysts. So this is where the problem starts.

We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order…we take what we know a little too seriously.

Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.

Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

You find peace by coming to terms with what you don’t know.

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.

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.

It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.

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.

Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.

If something is going on, I hear about it. I like to talk to people, I socialise. Television is a waste of time. Human contact is what matters.

Let’s be human the way we are human. Homo sum – I am a man. Don’t accept any Olympian view of man and you will do better in society.

Work hard, not in grunt work, but in chasing such opportunities and maximizing exposure to them. This makes living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters--you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity.

We cannot truly plan, because we do not understand the future--but this is not necessarily a bad news. We could plan while bearing in mind such limitations. It just takes guts.

Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.

It was hard to tell my friends, all hurt in some manner by the [stock market] crash, about this feeling of vindication. Bonuses at the time were a fraction of what they are today, but if my employer, First Boston, and the financial system survived until year-end, I would get the equivalent of a fellowship. This is sometimes called "fuck you money," which in spite of its coarseness, means that it allows you to act like Victorian gentleman, free from slavery. It is a psychological buffer: the capital is not so large as to make you spoiled-rich, but large enough to give you the freedom to choose a new occupation without excessive consideration of the financial rewards. It shields you from prostituting your mind and frees you from outside authority--any outside authority. (Independence is person-specific: I have always been taken aback at they high number of people in whom an astonishingly high income led to additional sycophancy as they became more dependent on their clients and employers and more addicted to making even more money.) While not substantial by some standards, it literally cured me of all financial ambition--it made me feel ashamed whenever I diverted time away from study for the pursuit of material wealth. Note that the designation fuck you corresponds to the exhilarating ability to pronounce that compact phrase before hanging up the phone.

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