“ At any point in time, the richest traders are often the worst traders. This, I will call the cross-sectional problem: At a given time in the market, the most successful traders are likely to be those… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ [T]he worst thing one can do to feel one knows things a bit deeper is to try to go into them a bit deeper. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ You stand above the rat race and the pecking order, not outside of it, if you do so by choice. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ You don't become completely free just by avoiding to be a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ You can tell if a discipline is BS if the degree depends severely on the prestige of the school granting it. I remember when I applied to MBA programs being told that anything outside the top ten or t… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ You can imagine how distraught I feel when I hear about the glorified heroism-free middle class values, which, thanks to globalization and the Internet, have spread to any place easily reached by Brit… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Yet simplicity has been difficult to implement in modern life because it is against the spirit of a certain brand of people who seek sophistication so they can justify their profession. Less is more a… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ Work destroys your soul by stealthily invading your brain during the hours not officially spent working; be selective about professions. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ While the meetings included traders, that is, people who are judged on their numerical performance, it was mostly a forum for salespeople (people capable of charming customers), and the category of en… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ While in the past people of rank or status were those and only those who took risks, who had the downside for their actions, and heroes were those who did so for the sake of others, today the exact re… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ While a ten-year survival rate for a trader is in the single digits, that of a risk manager is close to 100%). Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ When you don’t have debt you don’t care about your reputation in economics circles—and somehow it is only when you don’t care about your reputation that you tend to have a good one. Just Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ What sounds intelligent in a conversation or a meeting, or, particularly, in the media, is suspicious. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ What should we control? As a rule, intervening to limit size (of companies, airports, or sources of pollution), concentration, and speed are beneficial in reducing Black Swan risks. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ What makes life simple is that the robust and antifragile don’t have to have as accurate a comprehension of the world as the fragile—and Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ We see the obvious and visible consequences, not the invisible and less obvious ones. Yet those unseen consequences.., generally are more meaningful. Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ We produce thirty-year projections of social security deficits and oil prices without realizing that we cannot even predict these for next summer—our cumulative prediction errors for political and eco… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ We do not spontaneously learn that we don't learn that we don't learn. The problem lies in the structure of our minds: we don't learn rules, just facts, and only facts. Metarules (such as the rule tha… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“ We can simplify the relationships between fragility, errors, and antifragility as follows. When you are fragile, you depend on things following the exact planned course, with as little deviation as po… Nassim Nicholas Taleb
