Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s became famous for his book The Black Swan that taught us to look out for the unexpected X-Factor.
He also wrote The Bed of
Procrustes, a collection of hundreds of “philosophical and practical
aphorisms” – pithy one-line quotes full of meaning and importance.
I’ve selected a number of these that
struck me as financial or life lessons.
Who knows they may even make you a
better investor.
Enjoy…
1. Education makes the wise slightly
wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.
2. You are rich if and only if money
you refuse tastes better than money you accept.
3. The tragedy is that much of what
you think is random is in your control and, what’s worse, the opposite.
4. To bankrupt a fool, give him
information.
5. The best test of whether someone
is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news
makes sense to him.
6. The stock market, in brief:
participants are calmly waiting in line to be slaughtered while thinking it is
for a Broadway show.
7. A prophet is not someone with
special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see.
8. It takes a lot of intellect and
confidence to accept that what makes sense doesn’t really make sense.
9. The fastest way to become rich is
to socialize with the poor; the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with
the rich.
10. The characteristic feature of
the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind’s flaws, biases,
contradictions, and irrationality-without exploiting them for fun and profit.
11. “Wealthy” is meaningless and has
no robust absolute measure; use instead the subtractive measure “unwealth,”
that is, the difference, at any point in time, between what you have and what
you would like to have.
12. What I learned on my own I still
remember.
13. The calamity of the information
age is that the toxicity of data increases much faster than its benefits.
14. The sucker’s trap is when you
focus on what you know and what others don’t know, rather than the reverse.
15. What they call “risk” I call
opportunity; but what they call “low risk” opportunity I call a sucker problem.
16. The best test of whether someone
is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news
makes sense to him.
17. You can be certain that the head
of a corporation has a lot to worry about when he announces publicly that
“there is nothing to worry about.”
18. The main difference between
government bailouts and smoking is that in some rare cases the statement “this
is my last cigarette” holds true.
19. They would take forecasting more
seriously if it were pointed out to them that in Semitic languages the words
for forecast and “prophecy” are the same.
20. The three most harmful
addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.
21. Education makes the wise
slightly wiser, but makes the fool vastly more dangerous.
22. The best revenge on a liar is to
convince him that you believe what he said.
23. Even the cheapest misers can be
generous with advice.
24. The most painful moments are not
those we spend with uninteresting people; rather, they are those spent with
uninteresting people trying hard to be interesting.
25. You don’t become completely free
by just avoiding being a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master.
26. Some, like most bankers, are so
unfit for success that they look like dwarves in giants’ clothes.
27. Over the long term, you are more
likely to fool yourself than others.
28. It is those who use others who
are the most upset when someone uses them.
29. A genius is someone with flaws
harder to imitate than his qualities.
30. It is much less dangerous to
think like a man of action than to act like a man of thought.
31. Regular minds find similarities
in stories (and situations); finer minds detect differences.
32. You can only convince people who
think they can benefit from being convinced.
33. Trust people who make a living
lying down or standing up more than those who do so sitting down.
34. The difference between
magnificence and arrogance is in what one does when nobody is looking.
35. When conflicted between two
choices, take neither.
36. You know you have influence when
people start noticing your absence more than the presence of others.
37. They will envy you for your
success, your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status –
but rarely for your wisdom.
38. The imagination of the genius
vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses
his imagination
39. I suspect the I.Q., SAT, and
school grades are tests designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order
to call each other intelligent…
40. Smart and wise people who score
low on IQ tests, or patently intellectually defective ones, like the
former U.S. president George W. Bush, who score high on them (130), are
testing the test and not the reverse.
41. The curious mind embraces
science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the
leftover becomes an economist
42. In poor countries, officials
receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken
promise to work for large corporations
43. Suckers think that you cure
greed with money, addiction with substances, expert problems with experts,
banking with bankers, economics with economists, and debt crises with debt
spending
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