Taleb likes to invokePopper: 'No amount of observationsof white swans can allow the inferencethat all swans are white, but the observationof a single black swan is sufficientto refute that conclusion.
Suppose you were to total up all the wars over the past two hundred years that occurred between very large and very small countries. Let’s say that one side has to be at least ten times larger in popu...
People are in one of two states in a relationship, Gottman went on. The first is what I call positive sentiment override, where positive emotion overrides irritability. It’s like a buffer. Their spous...
No one-not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses-ever makes it alone
No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.
Next time you meet a doctor, and you sit down in his office and he starts to talk, if you have the sense that he isn’t listening to you, that he’s talking down to you, and that he isn’t treating you w...
My father will sit down and give you theories to explain why he does this or that, the son of the billionaire investor George Soros has said. But I remember seeing it as a kid, and thinking, At least...
It's not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It's whether or not our work fulfills us. Being a teacher is meaningful.
In recent years, for example, there has been much interest in the idea that one of the most fundamental factors in explaining personality is birth order: older siblings are domineering and conservativ...
Gosh darn it, Gau said, if you don’t try, you’ll never succeed. 10.
Emotion goes inside-out. Emotional contagion, though, suggests that the opposite is also true. If I can make you smile, I can make you happy. If I can make you frown, I can make you sad. Emotion, in t...
The great accomplishment of Jobs's life is how effectively he put his idiosyncrasies - his petulance, his narcissism, and his rudeness - in the service of perfection.
The Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt.
A statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample
Why is the fact that each of us comes from a culture with its own distinctive mix of strengths and weaknesses, tendencies and predispositions, so difficult to acknowledge? Who we are cannot be separat...
Why is a two-year-old so terrible? Because she is systematically testing the fascinating and, to her, utterly novel notion that something that gives her pleasure might not actually give someone else p...
When we become expert in something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex.
We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that-sometimes-we’re better off that way.
We have, in short, somehow become convinced that we need to tackle the whole problem, all at once. But the truth is that we don’t. We only need to find the stickiness Tipping Points,
Washington in 1965. We instinctively measure advantage in terms of the three M’s because men, money, and matériel are the easiest and most obvious ways to make sense of a battle. The only way to appre...
