Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Life

"Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive."

"There is no such thing as a failed soldier, dead or alive —likewise there is no such thing as a failed entrepreneur or failed scientific researcher ..."

"Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry."

"For the classics philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for me a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight."

"You can be an intellectual yet still be an idiot. 'Educated philistines' have been wrong on everything from Stalinism to Iraq to low-carb diets."

"Preoccupation with efficacy is the main obstacle to a poetic, elegant, robust and heroic life."

"You may not be able to change the world but can at least get some entertainment and make a living out of the epistemic arrogance of the human race."

"Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur."

"You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits."

"This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is a risk, that it is a bad thing ..."

"This makes living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters — you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity."

"At no point during his ordeal did Nero think of himself as 72% alive and 28% dead."

"Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families."

"Half of life—the interesting half of life—we don't even have a name for."

"From the standpoint of an institution, the existence of a risk manager has less to do with actual risk reduction than it has to do with the impression of risk reduction."

"Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury."

"Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses , not their investments ."

"t is about distortions of symmetry and reciprocity in life: If you have the rewards, you must also get some of the risks, not let others pay the price for your mistakes. ...If you give an opinion and someone follows it, you are morally obligated to be, yourself, exposed to its consequences."

"They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called “work” in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking “outside the box”; and when they die they are put in a box."

"If you want to get an idea of a friend's temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life. Can you assess the danger a criminal poses by examining only what he does on an ordinary day? Can we understand health without considering wild diseases and epidemics? Indeed the normal is often irrelevant."

"Let us use 10,000 fictional investment managers... nce a manager has a single bad year, he is thrown out of the sample. ...oss a coin; heads and the manager will make $10,000 over the year, tails and he will lose $10,000. ...We have, in a fair game, 313 managers who made money five years in a row. ...f we throw one of these ...into the real world we would get ...comments on his remarkable style, his incisive mind... His biographer will dwell on ...a great mind in the making. ...hould he stop performing they would start ...finding fault with his dissipated lifestyle. They will find something he stopped doing, and attribute his failure... The truth ...he simply ran out of luck."