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The positive accident (like hypertension medicine producing side benefits that led to Viagra) was the empirics’ central method of medical discovery.
This same point can be generalized to life: maximize the serendipity around you.
Note a slight disagreement on my part that does not change the story by much: the world, rather, moves by large incremental random changes.
I learned about this problem from the finance industry, in which we see “conservative” bankers sitting on a pile of dynamite but fooling themselves because their operations seem dull and lacking in volatility.
If you know that you are vulnerable to prediction errors, and if you accept that most “risk measures” are flawed, because of the Black Swan, then your strategy is to be as hyperconservative and hyperaggressive as you can be instead of being mildly aggressive or conservative.
The average will be medium risk but constitutes a positive exposure to the Black Swan. More technically, this can be called a “convex” combination.
Recall my discussion of the biotech company whose managers understood that the essence of research is in the unknown unknowns.
First, make a distinction between positive contingencies and negative ones.
There are both positive and negative Black Swans.
A negative–Black Swan business is one where the unexpected can hit hard and hurt severely. If you are in the military, in catastrophe insurance, or in homeland security, you face only downside.
Aside from the movies, examples of positive–Black Swan businesses are: some segments of publishing, scientific research, and venture capital.
You have little to lose per book and, for completely unexpected reasons, any given book might take off. The downside is small and easily controlled.
I find it hard to explain that when you have a very limited loss you need to get as aggressive, as speculative, and sometimes as “unreasonable” as you can be.
Don’t look for the precise and the local. Simply, do not be narrow-minded. The great discoverer Pasteur, who came up with the notion that chance favors the prepared, understood that you do not look for something particular every morning but work hard to let contingency enter your working life.
Likewise, do not try to predict precise Black Swans—it tends to make you more vulnerable to the ones you did not predict.
Seize any opportunity, or anything that looks like opportunity.
Remember that positive Black Swans have a necessary first step: you need to be exposed to them.
If a big publisher (or a big art dealer or a movie executive or a hotshot banker or a big thinker) suggests an appointment, cancel anything you have planned: yo...
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Collect as many free nonlottery tickets (those with open-ended payoffs) as you can, and, once they start paying off, do not discard them. Work hard, not in grunt work, but in chasing such opportunities and maximizing exposure to them.
Writing books is this sort of opportunity. You never know when or if one will become popular. What do you lose when you write a book? Nothing. You enjoy writing them. It won't affect your life in a negative way if none of the books sell. It will affect your life in a positive way if one is successful.
The same thing goes for buying and reading books. Every so often, there is a book that opens a new topic, a new way of thinking about the world. This change introduces flow into your life, which makes it more fun.
Diplomats understand that very well: casual chance discussions at cocktail parties usually lead to big breakthroughs—not
Beware of precise plans by governments.
The Achilles’ heel of capitalism is that if you make corporations compete, it is sometimes the one that is most exposed to the negative Black Swan that will appear to be the most fit for survival.
No one in particular is a good predictor of anything. Sorry.
I am not capable of avoiding being the fool of randomness; what I can do is confine it to where it brings some aesthetic gratification.
