35 Brilliant Insights From Nassim Taleb

35 Brilliant Insights From Nassim Taleb

STEVEN PERLBERG 46 MINUTES AGO 3,376 3

Facebook is the perfect platform for eccentric author Nassim Taleb, whose knack for thinking outside the box and waxing poetic is unparalleled. Here’s how the acclaimed author of The Black Swan describes his account: “This is for philosophical discussions. Please, no finance (or similarly depraved topics), and no journalists.” Oops. Taleb’s Facebook — which boasts 33,000+ followers — is truly a must-like for anyone interested in success, failure, Brooklyn, the modern condition, philosophy, the sordid state of journalism, or all of the above. Here are Taleb’s 35 most important observations. Each is a quote.

• The artificial gives us hangovers, the natural inverse-hangovers.
• The only problem with the last laugh is that the winner has to laugh alone.
• Intelligence without imagination: a deadly combination.
• There is no more unmistakable sign of failure than that of a middle-aged man boasting of his successes in college.
• Never trust a journalist unless she’s your mother.
• One of life’s machinations is to make some people both rich and unhappy, that is, jointly fragile and deprived of hope.
• [If] someone is making an effort to ignore you he is not ignoring you.
• The danger of reading financial & other news (or econobullshit) is that things that don’t make sense at all start making sense to you after progressive immersion.
• It’s a sign of weakness to worry about showing signs of weakness.
• Friends, I wonder if someone has computed how much would be saved if we shut down economics and political science departments in universities. Those who need to research these subjects can do so on their private time.
• I trust those who trust me and distrust those who are suspicious of others.
• A good man is warm and respectful towards the waiter or people of lower rank.
• Journalists feel contempt for those who fear them and a deep resentment for those who don’t.
• When someone starts a sentence with the first half containing “I”, “not”, and “but”, the “not” should be removed and the “but” replaced with “therefore.”
• High Modernity: routine in place of physical effort, physical effort in place of mental expenditure, & mental expenditure in place of mental clarity.
• The only valid political system is one that can handle an imbecile in power without suffering from it.
• Journalists cannot grasp that what is interesting is not necessarily important; most cannot even grasp that what is sensational is not necessarily interesting.
• Never buy a product that the owner of the company that makes it doesn’t use, or, in the case of, say, medication, wouldn’t contingently use.
• Just realized that to politely get rid of someone people in Brooklyn say “call me if you need anything.”
• Injuries done to us by others tend to be acute; the self-inflicted ones tend to be chronic.
• We often benefit from harm done to us by others; almost never from self-inflicted injuries.
• You will never know if someone is an asshole until he becomes rich.
• When someone writes “I dislike you but I agree with you”, I read “I dislike you because I agree with you.”
• A great book eludes summaries. A great aphorism resists expansion. The rest is just communication.
• For a free person, the optimal – most opportunistic – route between two points should never be the shortest one.
• What counts is not *what* people say, it is *how much* energy they spend saying it.
• Used skillfully, a compliment will be much more offensive than any disparagement.
• I trust those who are greedy for money a thousand time more than those who are greedy for credentials.
• Just as eating cow-meat doesn’t turn you into a cow, studying philosophy doesn’t make you wiser.
• It is a great compliment for an honest person to be mistaken for a crook by a crook.
• Many want to learn how to memorize things; few seek that rare ability to forget.
• If you have something very important to say, whisper it.
• The ultimate freedom lies in not having to explain “why” you did something.
• A book that can be summarized should not be written as a book.
• Friends, to confirm: for those who happen to be in Rome, let’s meet 6 PM tonite for a short expresso meeting (I buy, I insist) at Sant’Eustachio caffè, Piazza di Sant’Eustachio, 82.

Confronting the Limits of Networks; Business builders should not automatically expect that a network’s value will continue to increase geometrically as new members join

Confronting the Limits of Networks

Magazine: Summer 2002Opinion & Analysis July 15, 2002  Reading Time: 9 min

Andrew McAfee and François-Xavier Oliveau

Around 1980 Robert Metcalfe, the inventor of the Ethernet standard and founder of 3Com, developed a simple but powerful model to describe how networks become more important as they grow. He observed that a network’s value lies in the number of links it enables among members and that the quantity of links increases as the square of the total of the network’s members. Result: The value of a network increases in proportion to the square of the number of people using it. Read more of this post

New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change

Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change

by SHANE PARRISH

In New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change, Winifred Gallagher writes:

[O]ur fast-paced world invites us to see ourselves in yet another light—this time as nature’s virtuosos of change, who are biologically as well as psychologically primed to engage with novelty. Our ability to respond to the new and different is part of what makes us human. We’re simply more interested in whatever is outside of that status quo. Generally, this interest serves us well. In an evolutionary context it has likely saved us from extinction several times. While our affinity for seeking the new offered an advantage in a world without the Internet, it has never been tested in a world like today. The pace of information generation is crazy. Read more of this post

The path to power and how to use it; Collaboration and persuasion are the new tools in a demanding work environment

July 15, 2013 5:04 pm

The path to power and how to use it

By Philip Delves Broughton

Alternative models: the British Museum’s Neil MacGregor is among executives who have used power in different ways to manage their organisations

Power has bad connotations in management these days. It suggests headbangers and table-slammers, cigar-chomping men in smoke-filled rooms. Despite booming profits at JPMorgan, Jamie Dimon recently had to persuade shareholders that being both chief executive and chairman didn’t render him too powerful. Microsoft’s latest management revamp is intended to enhance collaboration across the company and eliminate the powerful fiefdoms that were hobbling its progress. Read more of this post

Forgiveness as a Business Tool

Forgiveness as a Business Tool

By Manfred Kets de Vries, INSEAD Distinguished Professor of Leadership Development & Organisational Change with Jane Williams, Editor Knowledge Abu Dhabi | July 8, 2013

Forgiveness can make us a better person but does it make a better leader? An eye for an eye for an eye for an eye…ends in making everyone blind. (Mahatma Ghandi)

The knee-jerk reaction of too many people in leadership positions when they feel wronged is righteous indignation and the urge for revenge. But one factor that sets truly transformational leaders apart from the run-of-the-mill is the ability to forgive – to let feelings of anger, resentment and blame fall away and become something constructive. Great leaders know the art of reconciliation. Read more of this post

Birds can navigate by the Earth’s magnetic field. How they do it is still a mystery

Birds can navigate by the Earth’s magnetic field. How they do it is still a mystery

Jul 13th 2013 |From the print edition

WHERE would people be without magnetic compasses? The short answer is: lost. By giving human beings a sixth sense—an ability to detect the hitherto invisible magnetic field of the Earth—the compass proved one of the most important inventions ever. It let sailors navigate without sight of the night sky. And that led to the voyages of discovery, trade and conquest which created the political geography of the modern world.

Imagine, then, what animals which had their own, built-in compasses could achieve. They might spend their summers doing the English Season in Glyndebourne or Henley, and then overwinter in the warmth of Mombasa. They might strike out, like intrepid pioneers, from Angola to Anchorage. They might even, if truly gripped by wanderlust and a hatred of the darkness, live in near-perpetual daylight by migrating from Pole to Pole. Read more of this post

Mark Suster Tells Founders To Be Authentic, Hire Co-Founders, And Give Before Taking

Mark Suster Tells Founders To Be Authentic, Hire Co-Founders, And Give Before Taking

DEREK ANDERSEN posted 21 hours ago

Editor’s note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a 45-city community in 20-countries, uniting the global startup world together through educating, inspiring, and connecting entrepreneurs.

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to interview Upfront Ventures‘ (previously GRP Partners) Mark Suster in Los Angeles. While the firm has been in operation since 1996, they recently announced a new $200 million fund. Mark is one of those VCs that is easy for most entrepreneurs to relate to because of his founder background, selling his last company to Salesforce and others before that. Read more of this post

Emma Marcegaglia, Business Europe president and “Italy’s iron lady”

July 14, 2013 4:01 pm

Emma Marcegaglia, Business Europe president

By Rachel Sanderson

‘Brussels bubble’: Emma Marcegaglia intends to spend only one or two days a week in the Belgian capital

When Emma Marcegaglia was four or five years old, she recalls playing a game of dolls with her brother Antonio, her fellow heir to Italy’s Marcegaglia steel multinational. “We’d say this doll is head of the commercial office, this is the head of production. I had all of these dolls working instead of making a party with cakes,” she says with a burst of laughter. It is telling that Ms Marcegaglia’s passion for business was present well before she became co-chief executive of the Marcegaglia group, making her Italy’s most high-profile businesswoman and earning her the moniker “Italy’s iron lady”. Later, as the head of Confindustria, Italy’s influential employers’ body, Ms Marcegaglia was the first woman to take on the role and became almost a daily media presence representing furious business owners in the last years of Silvio Berlusconi’s paralysed government. Read more of this post

Oregon Tuition Plan Punishes Graduates’ Success

Oregon Tuition Plan Punishes Graduates’ Success

Oregon is winning praise for a proposal to make college more affordable. It would allow students to attend in-state public universities at no immediate cost in exchange for 3 percent of their annual earnings for 25 years after they graduate.

The “pay it forward” plan has many details to be worked out, as Inside Higher Ed reported. The Oregon Legislature has unanimously approved a bill, which is awaiting the approval of Governor John Kitzhaber. It directs the state to create a pilot program by 2015 — at which time the idea would be formally considered. Read more of this post

The monk dubbed Myanmar’s Osama

The monk dubbed Myanmar’s Osama

MANDALAY — Radical Buddhist nationalism is sweeping Myanmar and at the forefront of the movement is a group more commonly associated with peace and tolerance: Monks.

6 HOURS 57 MIN AGO

MANDALAY — Radical Buddhist nationalism is sweeping Myanmar and at the forefront of the movement is a group more commonly associated with peace and tolerance: Monks. The most prominent among them is controversial cleric U Wirathu, who gives passionate sermons from his Mandalay base, calling on Buddhists to stand up against the “Muslim threat”. “I believe Islam is a threat not just to Buddhism, but to the (Burmese) people and the country,” says the monk, whose boyish face and toothy grin belie the name his critics have given him: The Buddhist Osama bin Laden. Myanmar was formerly known as Burma. Read more of this post