The Black Swan

Paid Link: “Look into your own existence. Count the significant events, the technological changes, and the inventions that have taken place in our environment since you were born and compare them to what was expected before their advent. How many of them came on a schedule? Look into your own personal life, to your choice of profession, say, or meeting your mate, your exile from your country of origin, the betrayals you faced, your sudden enrichment or impoverishment. How often did these things occur according to plan?”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable 

Past Experience

“Those who believe in the unconditional benefits of past experience should consider this pearl of wisdom allegedly voiced by a famous ship’s captain: But in all my experience, I have never been in any accident… of any sort worth speaking about. I have seen but one vessel in distress in all my years at sea. I never saw a wreck and never have been wrecked nor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort. E. J. Smith, 1907, Captain, RMS Titanic Captain Smith’s ship sank in 1912 in what became the most talked-about shipwreck in history.*”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

The Future

“Our human race is affected by a chronic underestimation of the possibility of the future straying from the course initially envisioned (in addition to other biases that sometimes exert a compounding effect). To take an obvious example, think about how many people divorce. Almost all of them are acquainted with the statistic that between one-third and one-half of all marriages fail, something the parties involved did not forecast while tying the knot. Of course, "not us," because "we get along so well" (as if others tying the knot got along poorly).”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Misfortune

“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, you will adapt to anything, as you probably did after past misfortunes.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Confidence

“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 is to be as smooth as possible in personal manners. It is much easier to signal self-confidence if you are exceedingly polite and friendly; you can control people without having to offend their sensitivity.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Winner Take All Effect

“. . . the world in which we live has an increasing number of feedback loops, causing events to be the cause of more events (say, people buy a book because other people bought it), thus generating snowballs and arbitrary and unpredictable planet-wide winner-take-all effects.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Life

“We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurrence of monstrous proportions.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

The Black Swan

“I don’t run for trains.” Snub your destiny. I have taught myself to resist running to keep on schedule. This may seem a very small piece of advice, but it registered. In refusing to run to catch trains, I have felt the true value of elegance and aesthetics in behavior, a sense of being in control of my time, my schedule, and my life. Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking. You stand above the rat race and the pecking order, not outside of it, if you do so by choice.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable 

The Black Swan

“Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird’s belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race “looking out for its best interests,” as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief.*”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Categorizing

“Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries,”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

How Do Theories Spread?

“I will repeat the following until I am hoarse: it is contagion that determines the fate of a theory in social science, not its validity.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

The Problem with Experts

“The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Weak Evidence

“When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

The Black Swan

“Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Forming Groups

“It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.

“The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?” and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: On Robustness and Fragility (Incerto)

The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: On Robustness and Fragility (Incerto) 

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb 

From Amazon: A black swan is an event, positive or negative, that is deemed improbable yet causes massive consequences. In this groundbreaking and prophetic book, Taleb shows in a playful way that Black Swan events explain almost everything about our world, and yet we—especially the experts—are blind to them. In this second edition, Taleb has added a new essay, On Robustness and Fragility, which offers tools to navigate and exploit a Black Swan world.

This book was fascinating and a quick read. I finished it in under 10 days. It really challenges your perception that things in life follow predictable patterns...ne it investing, inventions, or other changes in life.

As humans we tend to look back on the past and think that things were indeed predictable, but many life changing and world changing events weren't predictable at the time. And hindsight is 20-20, so we tend to think looking back that they were.

It tells the story of Yevgenia Nikolayevna Krasnova, a fictional author who experienced success on book sales out of nowhere. Many other stories and examples were cited in the book. 

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