After more than twenty years as a transactional trader and businessman in what I called the strange profession, I tried what one calls an academic career. And I have something to report—actually that...
Academia has a tendency, when unchecked (from lack of skin in the game), to evolve into a ritualistic self-referential publishing game.
Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.
A word on the display of emotions. Almost no one can conceal his emotions. Behavioral scientists believe that one of the main reasons why people become leaders is not from what skills they seem to pos...
A very intelligent group of revolutionary fellows in the United Kingdom created a political movement called the Fabian Society, named after the Cunctator, based on opportunistically delaying the revol...
A theory is like medicine or government: often useless, sometimes necessary, always self-serving and, on occasion, lethal. It needs to be used with care, moderation and close adult supervision.
A man is honorable in proportion to the personal risks he takes for his opinion—in other words, the amount of downside he is exposed to. To sum him up, Nero believed in erudition, aesthetics, and risk...
A good book gets better on the second reading. A great book on the third. Any book not worth rereading isn’t worth reading.
A cluster of municipalities with charming provincial enmities, their own internal fights, and people out to get one another aggregates to a quite benign and stable state.
A civil servant can make rules that are friendly to an industry such as banking—and then go off to J.P. Morgan and recoup a multiple of the difference between his or her current salary and the market...
Respect for the weak being, after intellectual courage, the second most attractive quality to this author),
Мы, люди, не просто крайне поверхностны (это еще можно было бы както исправить) — мы очень несправедливы.
Înfruntați-vă destinul. M-am obișnuit să rezist tentației de a alerga pentru a-mi respecta orarul. Poate fi un sfat neimportant, dar s-a dovedit valabil. Refuzând să alerg pentru a prinde trenuri, am...
¿No es extraño ver que un suceso se produce precisamente porque no se esperaba que fuera a ocurrir? ¿Qué tipo de defensa tenemos contra ello? Cualquier cosa que se nos ocurra (que Nueva York es un bla...
You cannot separate knowledge from contact with the ground. Actually, you cannot separate anything from contact with the ground. And the contact with the real world is done via skin in the game—having...
What is made to fly will not do well trapped on the ground,
We are not learning from a mere thousand days, but benefiting, thanks to evolution, from the learning of our ancestors—which found its way into our biology.
The more interesting their conversation, the more cultured they are, the more they will be trapped into thinking that they are effective at what they are doing in real business (something psychologist...
The more cultured they are, the more they will be trapped into thinking that they are effective at what they are doing in real business (something psychologists call the halo effect, the mistake of th...
The cycles of risk taking in the economy as following a pattern: stability and absence of crises encourage risk taking, complacency, and lowered awareness of the possibility of problems. Then