 | Nassim Nicholas TalebLebanese-American essayist, scholar and statistician |
They will envy you for your success, for your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status - but rarely for your wisdom.
Writers are remembered for their best work, politicians for their worst mistakes, and businessmen are almost never remembered.
We are only truly alive in those moments when we improvise; no schedule, just small surprises and stimuli from the environment.
The principal thing you can learn from a professor is how to be a professor - and the chief thing you can learn from, say, a life coach or inspirational speaker is how to become a life coach or inspirational speaker.
Those who engage in smear campaigning as a profession are necessarily incompetent at everything else - hence at that business too.
If you hear advice from a grandmother or elders, odds are that it works 90 percent of the time. On the other hand [...] if you read anything by psychologists and behavioral scientists, odds are that it works at less than 10 percent, unless it is has also been covered by the grandmother and the classics, in which case why would you need a psychologist?
It is much easier to do business with the owner of the business than some employee who is likely to lose his job next year; likewise it is easier to trust the word of an autocrat than a fragile elected official.
Individuals don`t need to know where they are going; markets do. Leave people alone under a good structure and they will take care of things.
Learning is rooted in repetition [...], meaning that the reading of a single text twice is more profitable than reading two different things once, provided of course that said text has some depth of content.