Writers are remembered for their best work, politicians for their worst mistakes, and businessmen are almost never remembered.
What fools call wasting time is most often the best investment.
We observe old people and see them age, so we associate aging with their loss of muscle mass, bone weakness, loss of mental function, taste for Frank Sinatra music, and similar degenerative effects. B...
We have always been crazy but weren't skilled enough to destroy the world. Now we can.
We grossly overestimate the length of the effect of misfortune on our lives. You think that the loss of your fortune or current position will be devastating, but you are probably wrong. More likely, y...
Traders, when they make profits, have short communications; when they lose they drown you in details, theories, and charts.
Their three flaws: 1) they think in statics not dynamics, 2) they think in low, not high, dimensions, 3) they think in terms of actions, never interactions.
The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves. So I disagree with th...
The problem of lumpy payoffs is not so much in the lack of income they entail, but the pecking order, the loss of dignity, the subtle humiliations near the watercooler.
The first leg of the triplet is the pathology of thinking that the world in which we live is more understandable, more explainable, and therefore more predictable than it actually is.
The first heuristic addresses the asymmetry in rewards and punishment, or transfer of fragility between individuals. Ralph Nader has a simple rule: people voting for war need to have at least one desc...
The excess energy released from overreaction to setbacks is what innovates!
The entire notion of biography is grounded in the arbitrary ascription of a causal relation between specified traits and subsequent events. Now
The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today’s employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.
The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding,
The Web is an unhealthy place for someone hungry for attention.
The Procrustean bed in life consists precisely in simplifying the non-linear and making it linear—the simplification that distorts.
The Golden Rule wants you to Treat others the way you would like them to treat you. The more robust Silver Rule says Do not treat others the way you would not like them to treat you.
The French writer Edmond About, who visited Greece in 1832, a dozen years after its independence, reports how peasants struggled with the metric system as it was completely unnatural to them and stuck...
The French thinker and poet Paul Valery was surprised to listen to a commentary of his poems that found meanings that had until then escaped him (of course, it was pointed out to him that these were i...