Quote

To succeed in life requires a total inability to do anything that makes you uncomfortable when you look at yourself in the mirror.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: September 11
Author
Economist
Essayist
Mathematician
Philosopher
Statistician
University Teacher
Writer
Nassim Nicholas Najib Taleb
Nassim Taleb
Look
Mirror
Looks
Uncomfortable
Life
Total
Mirrors
Requires
Succeed
Makes
Anything
Inability

More quotes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Don't ask the barber whether you need a haircut, and don't ask an academic if what he does is relevant.
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Another definition of modernity: conversations can be more and more completely reconstructed with clips from other conversations taking place at the same time on the planet.
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The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn't care too much.
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It is my great hope someday, to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known. Namely that our highest currency is respect.
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When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.
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My nightmare scenario is that the government saves Citibank once again, as well as the other banks, and business resumes as usual. Then, the next time the system breaks, it breaks much, much bigger.
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It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one.
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I lift heavy weights and sprint, but I am so bad at it that I develop severe injuries.
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We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.
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Never think that lack of variability is stability. Don't confuse lack of volatility with stability, ever.
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Someone who says I am busy is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you.
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Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer.
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Comfort makes you weaker. We need some variability, some stressors. Not too much, but just enough.
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Probability is not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive.
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It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement.
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When you beat up someone physically, you get excercise and stress relief when you assault him verbally on the Internet, you just harm yourself.
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[A] theory is a very dangerous thing to have.
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Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.
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A washing machine needs constant maintenance. It doesn't want any harm. It wants tranquility, and you need someone to - you're not going to harm it by continuously monitoring it and adjusting it.
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We glorify those who left their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent. We humans are not just a superficial race - we are a very unfair one.
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