By Alexander Greene
Dr. Taleb is the bestselling author of "Fooled by Randomness," about the underestimation of randomness in modern life, and "The Black Swan," about the likelihood of major, unpredictable events occurring in financial markets. (With auspicious timing, the latter came out just as the financial crisis of 2007-2008 began to unfold.) Both books are now considered investment classics.
Taleb is an insightful and unorthodox thinker. A practitioner of mathematical finance, he is an Oxford University professor, a former hedge fund manager and a scientific advisor at Universa Investments.
When I last chatted with him, he told me he was writing a book about religion. That is still in the works, however. Last year he published "The Bed of Procrustes," a collection of philosophical thoughts about work, life and the limits of our understanding.
Taleb believes that when facing situations where we have limited knowledge, we tend to squeeze our thinking into widely accepted ideas and prepackaged narratives... with potentially explosive consequences. (Many investors learned this the hard way during the financial meltdown a few years ago.) His goal is to get you to reexamine your premises.
Taleb's points are often counterintuitive. Some are maddening. A few are elitist. Virtually all are thought provoking. That alone makes him worth reading.
Here is just a small sampling:
Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.
Work destroys your soul by stealthily invading your brain during the hours not officially spent working.
Preoccupation with efficacy is the main obstacle to a poetic, noble, elegant, robust and heroic life.
They will envy you for your success, for your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status - but rarely for your wisdom.
Don't cross a river because it is on average four feet deep.
Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.
Those who think religion is about "belief" don't understand religion, and don't understand belief. By accepting the sacred, you reinvent religion.
After a long diet from the media, I came to realize that there is nothing that's not (clumsily) trying to sell you something. I only trust my library.
The opposite of success isn't failure; it's name-dropping.
Read nothing from the past one hundred years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years (just wine and water).
In Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, the magnificent is the "great-souled" who thinks of himself as worthy of great things and, aware of his own position in life, abides by a certain system of ethics that excludes pettiness...
The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.
You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.
You are rich if and only if the money you refuse tastes better than the money you accept.
It is as difficult to change someone's opinions as it is to change his tastes.
The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist.
Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it.
There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.
My only measure of success is how much time you have to kill.
Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and the absence of agitation.
We are only truly alive in those moments when we improvise; no schedule, just small surprises and stimuli from the environment.
You need to keep reminding yourself of the obvious: charm lies in the unsaid, the unwritten, and the undisplayed. It takes mastery to control silence.
The sucker's trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don't know, rather than the reverse.
"Wealthy" is meaningless and has no robust absolute measure; use instead the subtractive measure "unwealth," that is, the difference between what you have and what you would like to have.
More than anything, the book is an eloquent plea to slow down and think. Indeed, Taleb provides no commentary on any of his short sayings. His intention is not to explain but to provoke.
An aphorism, he believes, is like poetry, something the reader needs to work out for himself.
