How much you truly believe in something can be manifested only through what you are willing to risk for it.
History and societies do not crawl. They make jumps. They go from fracture to fracture, with a few vibrations in between. Yet we (and historians) like to believe in the predictable, small incremental...
Heroism and the respect it commands is a form of compensation by society for those who take risks for others. And entrepreneurship is a risky and heroic activity, necessary for growth or even the mere...
Heikot toimivat tarpeidensa mukaan, vahvemmat velvollisuutensa.
He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors—though never the same error more than once—is more reliable than someone who has ne...
He is often involved in a strange ritual, something commonly called a meeting. Now, in addition to these traits, he defaults to thinking that what he doesn’t see is not there, or what he does not unde...
Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and...
Half of life—the interesting half of life—we don’t have a name for.
Give me a few lines written by any man and I will find enough to get him hung goes the saying attributed to Richelieu, Voltaire, Talleyrand (a vicious censor during the French revolution phase of terr...
George Santayana: A man is morally free when … he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.
Further, in countries where wealth comes from rent-seeking, political patronage, or regulatory capture (which, I remind the reader, is how the powerful and the insiders use regulation to scam the publ...
Fragility can be measured; risk is not measurable (outside of casinos or the minds of people who call themselves risk experts). This provides a solution to what I’ve called the Black Swan problem—the...
For the antifragile, shocks bring more benefits (equivalently, less harm) as their intensity increases (up to a point).
For studying courage in textbooks doesn’t make you any more courageous than eating cow meat makes you bovine. By some mysterious mental mechanism, people fail to realize that the principal thing you c...
For instance, it has been argued since the 1970s that limiting speed on the highway (and enforcing it) leads to an extremely effective increase in safety. This can be plausible because risks of accide...
For instance, having an intense emotional shock from seeing a snake coming out of my keyboard or a vampire entering my room, followed by a period of soothing safety (with chamomile tea and baroque mus...
For an idea to have survived so long across so many cycles is indicative of its relative fitness. Noise, at least some noise, was filtered out. Mathematically, progress means that some new information...
For The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding, or better at explaining than doing.
Entrepreneurs are selected to be just doers, not thinkers, and doers do, they don’t talk, and it would be unfair, wrong, and downright insulting to measure them in the talk department. The same with a...
Entrepreneurs are heroes in our society. They fail for the rest of us.