Lebanese-American mathematical statistician, option trader, risk analyst and author (born 1960)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1 January 1960 in Amioun, Lebanon) is an essayist, epistemologist, researcher, and former practitioner of mathematical finance.
It is a sign of weakness to avoid showing signs of weakness.
I never trust a man who doesn't have enemies.
The odds of an academic "researcher" producing anything eventually used by society is of the order of .00001%. That includes scientists. The odds for a baker: 100%
If you want to teach someone a real skill, teach him how to fail. He will never learn it in school.
You never cure structural defects; the system corrects itself by collapsing.
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If you do not take risks for your ideas you are nothing. Nothing.
Work hard, not in grunt work, but in chasing such opportunities and maximizing exposure to them. This makes living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters-you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity.
To teach someone a real skill, teach him how to take risk & fail. He will never learn this in school. No nonrisktaker can ever teach it.
Never take an advice from a salesman, or any advice that benefits the advice giver.
A prostitute who sells her body (temporarily) is vastly more honorable than someone who sells his opinion for promotion or job tenure.
When people call you intelligent it is almost always because they agree with you.
No, do not join an NGO to save the world. Just take risks, start a business.
Being nice counts the most when you are nice to people ignored by others.
When people get rich, they shed their skin-in-the-game-driven experiential mechanism. They lose control of their preferences, substituting constructed preferences for their own, complicating their lives unnecessarily, triggering their own misery.
Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.