By Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I enjoyed the first few chapters of this book with the author’s anti-establishment atititude. Yet the author seems to take joy in using weird sounding words that are out of my vocab, which makes the rest of the book lengthy and tiresome. Takeway: it is foolhardy to predict future events, their happenings or the extent of their impacts. Most economic theories look at past downturns and crashes in retrospect and try to explain things with present information, which is not available when looking forward to predict, so don’t rely on them. Besides, rare events we don’t expect often carry large consequences. So insure against bad one and expose oneself to good one is the way to go :)

When Missing a Train is Painless

I once received another piece of life-changing advice, which unlike the advice I got from a friend in Chapter 3, I find applicable, wise and empirically valid. My classmate in Paris, the novelist-to-be Jean-Olivier Tedesco, pronounced, as he prevented me from running to catch a subway, “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.

Quitting a high-paying position, if it is your decision, will seem a better payoff than the utility of the money involved (this may seem crazy, but I’ve tried it and it works). This is the first step toward the stoic’s throwing a four-letter word at fate. You have far more control over your life if you decide on your criterion by yourself.

Mother Nature has given us some defense mechanisms: as in Aesop’s fable, one of these is our ability to consider that the grapes we cannot (or did not) reach are sour. But an aggressively stoic prior disdain and rejection of the grapes is even more rewarding. Be aggressive; be the one to resign, if you have the guts.

It ‘s more difficult to be a loser in a game you set up yourself.

In Black Swan terms, this means that you’re exposed to the improbable only if you let it control you. You always control what you do; so make this your end.

THE END

But all these ideas, all this philosophy of induction, all these problems with knowledge, all these wild opportunities and scary possible losses, everything palls in front of the following metaphysical consideration.

I am sometimes taken aback by how people can have a miserable day or get angry because they feel cheated by a bad meal, cold coffee, a social rebuff, or a rude reception. Recall my discussion in Chapter 8 on the difficulty in seeing the true odds of the events that run your own 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.

Imagine a speck of dust next to a planet a billion times the size of the earth. The speck of dust represents the odds in favor of your being born; the huge planet would be the odds against it. So stop sweating the small stuff. Don’t be like the ingrate who got a castle as a present and worried about the mildew in the bathroom. Stop looking the gift horse in the mounth– remember that you are a Black Swan. And thank you for reading my book.