Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (Incerto, #5)

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

But never engage in detailed overexplanations of why something important is important:

By definition, what works cannot be irrational; about every single person I know who has chronically failed in business shares that mental block, the failure to realize

that if something stupid works (and makes money), it cannot be stupid.

Our message is to focus on those who are professionally slanted, causing harm without being accountable for it, by the very structure of their own occupation.

Intellectualism is the belief that one can separate an action from the results of such action, that one can separate theory from practice, and that one can always fix a complex system by hierarchical approaches, that is, in a (ceremonial) top-down manner.

By some mysterious mental mechanism, people fail to realize that the principal thing you can learn from a professor is how to be a professor—and the chief thing you can learn from, say, a life coach or inspirational speaker is how to become a life coach or inspirational speaker.

I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist.

if wealth is giving you fewer options instead of more (and more varied) options, you’re doing it wrong.

Love without sacrifice is theft

An error-free world would have no penicillin, no chemotherapy…almost no drugs, and most probably no humans.

To take stock: a situation is deemed non-ergodic when observed past probabilities do not apply to future processes.

you start betting aggressively whenever you have a profit, never when you have a deficit, as if a switch was turned on or off. This method is practiced by probably every single trader who has survived.

“what’s the worst thing that can happen to you?”

“The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything,” he said.

make the case for risk loving, for systematic “convex” tinkering, and for taking a lot of risks that don’t have tail risks but offer tail profits.

One may be risk loving yet completely averse to ruin.