The first rule of happiness is low expectations - Morgan Housel

Simplicity is the hallmark of truth — we should know better, but complexity continues to have a morbid attraction. When you give an academic audience a lecture that is crystal clear from alpha to omega, your audience feels cheated. . . . The sore truth is that complexity sells better.

Nassim Taleb put it this way: “Having an ‘edge’ and surviving are two different things: the first requires the second. You need to avoid ruin. At all costs.

Whenever we are surprised by something, even if we admit that we made a mistake, we say, ‘Oh I’ll never make that mistake again.’ But, in fact, what you should learn when you make a mistake because you did not anticipate something is that the world is difficult to anticipate. That’s the correct lesson to learn from surprises: that the world is surprising. The correct lesson to learn from surprises is that the world is surprising.