Trading forces someone to think hard; those who merely work hard generally lose their focus and intellectual energy. In addition, they end up drownin… - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The story of the “exquisite cadavers” is as follows. In the aftermath of the First World War, a collection of surrealist poets — which included André Breton, their pope, Paul Eluard, and others — got together in cafés and tried the following exercise (modern literary critics attribute the exercise to the depressed mood after the war and the need to escape reality). On a folded piece of paper, in turn, each one of them would write a predetermined part of a sentence, not knowing the others’ choice. The first would pick an adjective, the second a noun, the third a verb, the fourth an adjective, and the fifth a noun. The first publicized exercise of such random (and collective) arrangement produced the following poetic sentence: The exquisite cadavers shall drink the new wine. (Les cadavres exquis boiront le vin nouveau.) Impressive? It sounds even more poetic in the native French. Quite impressive poetry has been produced in such a manner, sometimes with the aid of a computer. But poetry has never been truly taken seriously outside of the beauty of its associations, whether they have been produced by the random ranting of one or more disorganized brains, or the more elaborate constructions of one conscious creator.

To be a real Human, one needs intelligence, courage, tenacity, curiosity, and a strong sense of justice. Remove any one of the five and you end up with the equivalent of a lemon. Remove the sense of justice and you end up with a monster.

Learn to read history, get all the knowledge you can, do not frown on the anecdote, but do not draw any causal links, do not try to reverse engineer too much — but if you do, do not make big scientific claims.