George > George's Quotes

“If you have more than one reason to do something (choose a doctor or veterinarian, hire a gardener or an employee, marry a person, go on a trip), just don’t do it. It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something. Obvious decisions (robust to error) require no more than a single reason.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“Further, my characterization of a loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn’t introspect, doesn’t exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on. These types often consider themselves the “victims” of some large plot, a bad boss, or bad weather. Finally, a thought. He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors—though never the same error more than once—is more reliable than someone who has never made any.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder

“Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder

“The biologist and intellectual E. O. Wilson was once asked what represented the most hindrance to the development of children; his answer was the soccer mom. He did not use the notion of the Procrustean bed, but he outlined it perfectly. His argument is that they repress children's natural biophilia, their love of living things. But the problem is more general; soccer moms try to eliminate the trial and error, the antifragility, from children's lives, move them away from the ecological and transform them into nerds working on preexisting (soccer-mom-compatible) maps of reality. Good students, but nerds--that is, they are like computers except slower. Further, they are now totally untrained to handle ambiguity. As a child of civil war, I disbelieve in structured learning . . . . Provided we have the right type of rigor, we need randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, near-traumatic episodes, all those things that make life worth living, compared to the structured, fake, and ineffective life of an empty-suit CEO with a preset schedule and an alarm clock.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“Most humans manage to squander their free time, as free time makes them dysfunctional, lazy, and unmotivated—the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“The simpler, the better. Complications lead to multiplicative chains of unanticipated effects.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“More data—such as paying attention to the eye colors of the people around when crossing the street—can make you miss the big truck.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“Steve Jobs: “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction, and is magnified by attempts to satisfy it—books have a secret mission and ability to multiply, as everyone who has wall-to-wall bookshelves knows well.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder

“that if you need something urgently done, give the task to the busiest (or second busiest) person in the office.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“intuition is always right in at least two important ways;
It is always in response to something.
it always has your best interest at heart”
― Gavin De Becker, The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence

“Watching other people become rich is not much fun, especially if they do it overnight and without any effort.”
― Liaquat Ahamed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

“And what would humans be without love?"
RARE, said Death.”
― Terry Pratchett, Sourcery

“My life has become a single, ongoing revelation that I haven’t been cynical enough.”
― James S.A. Corey, Babylon’s Ashes

“All things have a value. Sometimes the value is paid in coin. Other times, it is paid in time and sweat. And finally, sometimes it is paid in blood.

Humanity seems most eager to use this latter currency. And we never note how much of it we’re spending, unless it happens to be our own.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, Foundryside

“In economics, things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could.”
― Rudiger Dornbusch