I love Voltaire’s observation that “History never repeats itself; man always does. - Morgan Housel

Optimism sounds like a sales pitch. Pessimism sounds like someone trying to help you.

Physicist Freeman Dyson once explained that what’s often attributed to the supernatural, or magic, or miracles, is actually just basic math. In any normal person’s life, miracles should occur at the rate of roughly one per month: The proof of the law is simple. During the time that we are awake and actively engaged in living our lives, roughly for eight hours each day, we see and hear things happening at a rate of one per second. So the total number of events that happen to us is about 30,000 per day, or about a million per month. If the chance of a “miracle” is one in a million, we should therefore experience one per month, on average.

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.