The Black Swan, the impact of the highly improbable

Black swan: a term coined for highly improbably event, such as the discovery of black swans in Australia in the 17th century. Before the discovery, people held the belief that "all swans are white".

Although I haven't finished it, Nassim Taleb's book "The Black Swan" is quite refreshing. I am not going to summarize the book, but I have one favorite passage so far.


"Numerous studies of millionaires aimed at figuring out the skills required for hotshotness follow the following methodology. [...] They look at what those big guns have in common: courage, risk taking, optimism, and infer that these traits, most notably risk taking, help you to become successful.

Now consider the cemetery. The graveyard of failed persons will be full of people who shared the following traints: courage, risk taking, optimism, etc. Just like the population of millionaires. [..] what truly separates the two is for the most part a single factor: luck. Plain luck".

Taleb is an anti-intellectual intellectual (if that makes sense). He makes fun of people (mostly finance analyst and CEOs) who thinks they have it all figured out. He argues that humans tend to generalize too much based on what we see, but neglect what we do not see. On the other hand, Taleb definitely understands what it means to take risk in one's career.

"If you are a researcher, you will have to publish inconsequential articles in 'prestigious' publications so that others say hello to you once in a while when you run into them at conference. [---->SO TRUE!]

Many people labor in life under the impression that they are doing something right, yet they may not show solid results for a long time. [...] No confirmation comes to them, no validation, no Nobel, 'How was your year?" brings them a small but containable spasm of pain deep inside, since almost all of their years will seem wasted to someone looking at their life from the outside. Then bang, the lumpy event comes that brings the grand vindication. Or it may never come".

So now I won't feel so bad if I don't "make it". : )