Nassim Nicholas Taleb... and the Pursuit of Phronesis

by Alexander Green (of Spiritual Wealth - via e-mail)
Dr. Taleb is the bestselling author of "Fooled by Randomness," about the underestimation of randomness in modern life, and "The Black Swan," about the likelihood of major, unpredictable events occurring in financial markets. (With auspicious timing, the latter came out just as the financial crisis of 2007-2008 began to unfold.) Both books are now considered investment classics.

Taleb is an insightful and unorthodox thinker. A practitioner of mathematical finance, he is an Oxford University professor, a former hedge fund manager and a scientific advisor at Universa Investments.

Taleb believes that when facing situations where we have limited knowledge, we tend to squeeze our thinking into widely accepted ideas and prepackaged narratives... with potentially explosive consequences. (Many investors learned this the hard way during the financial meltdown a few years ago.) His goal is to get you to reexamine your premises.

Taleb's points are often counterintuitive. Some are maddening. A few are elitist. Virtually all are thought provoking. That alone makes him worth reading.

Here is just a small sampling:

• Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.

• Work destroys your soul by stealthily invading your brain during the hours not officially spent working.

• Preoccupation with efficacy is the main obstacle to a poetic, noble, elegant, robust and heroic life.

• They will envy you for your success, for your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status - but rarely for your wisdom.

• Don't cross a river because it is on average four feet deep.

• Asking science to explain life and vital matters is equivalent to asking a grammarian to explain poetry.

• Those who think religion is about "belief" don't understand religion, and don't understand belief. By accepting the sacred, you reinvent religion.

• After a long diet from the media, I came to realize that there is nothing that's not (clumsily) trying to sell you something. I only trust my library.

• The opposite of success isn't failure; it's name-dropping.

• Read nothing from the past one hundred years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years (just wine and water).

• In Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, the magnificent is the "great-souled" who thinks of himself as worthy of great things and, aware of his own position in life, abides by a certain system of ethics that excludes pettiness... The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.

• You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.

• You are rich if and only if the money you refuse tastes better than the money you accept.

• It is as difficult to change someone's opinions as it is to change his tastes.

• The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist.

• Your reputation is harmed the most by what you say to defend it.

• There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.

• My only measure of success is how much time you have to kill.

• Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and the absence of agitation.

• We are only truly alive in those moments when we improvise; no schedule, just small surprises and stimuli from the environment.

• You need to keep reminding yourself of the obvious: charm lies in the unsaid, the unwritten, and the undisplayed. It takes mastery to control silence.

• The sucker's trap is when you focus on what you know and what others don't know, rather than the reverse.

• "Wealthy" is meaningless and has no robust absolute measure; use instead the subtractive measure "unwealth," that is, the difference between what you have and what you would like to have.

More than anything, the book is an eloquent plea to slow down and think. Indeed, Taleb provides no commentary on any of his short sayings. His intention is not to explain but to provoke.

An aphorism, he believes, is like poetry, something the reader needs to work out for himself.

The 25 Smartest Things Steve Jobs Ever Said

By Morgan Housel       
One of coolest things about Steve Jobs was his willingness to respond to customers' emails. And some of the responses were legendary.

One customer wrote complaining about Apple Care after spilling water on his MacBook. "It sounds like you're just looking for someone to get mad at other than yourself," Jobs replied. Another complained that the Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL ) iPhone 4 loses reception when cupped in your hand. "Just avoid holding it in that way," Jobs advised. Jobs openly shared his thoughts with the public. And he was more quotable than many think. In honor of Apple's visionary, who passed away on Wednesday, here are 25 of his best lines.

25. "Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me. Going to bed saying we've done something wonderful ... that matters to me."
24. "I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. Humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list ... That didn't look so good, but then someone at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And a man on a bicycle blew the condor away. That's what a computer is to me: the computer is the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with. It's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds."
23. "In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service."
22. "I'm as proud of what we don't do as I am of what we do."
21. "We don't get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? And we've all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it."
20. "My model for business is The Beatles: They were four guys that kept each other's negative tendencies in check; they balanced each other. And the total was greater than the sum of the parts. Great things in business are never done by one person; they are done by a team of people."
19. "The system is that there is no system. That doesn't mean we don't have process. Apple is a very disciplined company, and we have great processes. But that's not what it's about. Process makes you more efficient. But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we've been thinking about a problem. It's ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea. And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don't get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We're always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it's only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important."
18. "I wish [Bill Gates] the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft  are a bit narrow. He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.''
17. "My self-identity does not revolve around being a businessman, though I recognize that is what I do. I think of myself more as a person who builds neat things. I like building neat things. I like making tools that are useful to people. I like working with very bright people. I like interacting in the world of ideas, though somehow those ideas have to be tied to some physical reality. One of the things I like the most is dropping a new idea on a bunch of incredibly smart and talented people and then letting them work it out themselves. I like all of that very, very much."
16. "Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it."
15. "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma -which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."
14. "You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new."
13. "A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."
12. "We're gambling on our vision, and we would rather do that than make 'me, too' products. Let some other companies do that. For us, it's always the next dream."
11. "The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament."
10. "A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets."
9. "When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don't put in the time or energy to get there."
8. "That's been one of my mantras -- focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex."
7. "We didn't build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren't going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build."
6. "Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected."
5. "We've never worried about numbers. In the marketplace, Apple is trying to focus the spotlight on products, because products really make a difference. ... You can't con people in this business. The products speak for themselves."
4. "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something -- your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."
3. "Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people."
2. "Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle."
1. "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish."

Original Source