Technology can degrade (and endanger) every aspect of a sucker's life while convincing him that it is becoming more "efficient." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Further, being fooled by randomness is that in most circumstances fraught with a high degree of randomness, one cannot really tell if a successful person has skills, or if a person with skills will succeed — but we can pretty much predict the negative, that a person totally devoid of skills will eventually fail.

Let me insist that erudition is important to me. It signals genuine intellectual curiosity. It accompanies an open mind and the desire to probe the ideas of others. Above all, an erudite can be dissatisfied with his own knowledge, and such dissatisfaction is a wonderful shield against Platonicity, the simplifications of the five-minute manager, or the philistinism of the overspecialized scholar. Indeed, scholarship without erudition can lead to disasters.

Have enemies; but make sure that they think about you much, much more than you think about them.