Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Steve Jobs figured out that “you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.” The Arabs have an expression for trenchant prose: no skill to understand it, mastery to write it.

If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.

Consider that as I am writing these lines, we are living in a debt crisis. The world as a whole has never been richer, and it has never been more heavily in debt, living off borrowed money. The record shows that, for society, the richer we become, the harder it gets to live within our means. Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.

Undercompensation from the absence of a stressor, inverse hormesis, absence of challenge, degrades the best of the best.