Recall that the fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn’t care too much.
No one in particular is a good predictor of anything. Sorry.
No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we are at dominating the odds, randomness will have the last word.
Never hire an academic unless his function is to partake of the rituals of writing papers or taking exams.
Never ask people what they want, or where they want to go, or where they think they should go, or, worse, what they think they will desire tomorrow.
Light control works; close control leads to overreaction,
Let us return to the idea that universities generate wealth and the growth of useful knowledge in society. There is a causal illusion here; time to bust it.
La Ley de Rodas establece que si se tira mercancía para aligerar la carga del barco, lo que se ha perdido para beneficio de todos debe recuperarse mediante la contribución de todos.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, citing him: It seemed, wrote Machiavelli, that in the midst of murders and civil wars, our republic became stronger [and] its citizens infused with virtues.… A little bit...
It is much more immoral to claim virtue without fully living with its direct consequences.
I write only if I feel like it and only on a subject I feel like writing about—and the reader is no fool.
I have no large desire to sacrifice much of my personal habits, intellectual pleasures, and personal standards in order to become a billionaire like Warren Buffett, and I certainly do not see point of...
Humans will believe anything you say provided you do not exhibit the smallest shadow of diffidence; like animals, they can detect the smallest crack in your confidence before you express it. The trick...
How was your year? brings them a small but containable spasm of pain deep inside, since almost all of their years will seem wasted to someone looking at their life from the outside.
Experience is devoid of the cherry-picking that we find in studies, particularly those called observational, ones in which the researcher finds past patterns, and, thanks to the sheer amount of data,...
Everything nonstable or breakable has had ample chance to break over time.
Compromising is condoning. The only modern dictum I follow is one by George Santayana: A man is morally free when … he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity. This is no...
By setting oneself totally free of constraints, free of thoughts, free of this debilitating activity called work, free of efforts, elements hidden in the texture of reality start staring at you; then...
But simplicity is not so simple to attain. Steve Jobs figured out that you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. The Arabs have an expression for trenchant prose: no skill to...
Being an executive does not require very developed frontal lobes, but rather a combination of charisma, a capacity to sustain boredom, and the ability to shallowly perform on harrying schedules.