Its a book. By Nassim Taleb. Have you ever heard of it ? Its well worth a read/listen. Here are some quotes:
“Those who were unlucky in life in spite of their skills would eventually rise. The lucky fool might have benefited from some luck in life; over the longer run he would slowly converge to the state of a less-lucky idiot. Each one would revert to his long-term properties.”
“Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.”
“A mistake is not something to be determined after the fact, but in light of the information available until that point”
“Reality is far more vicious than Russian roulette. First, it delivers the fatal bullet rather infrequently, like a revolver that would have hundreds, even thousands of chambers instead of six. After a few dozen tries, one forgets about the existence of a bullet, under a numbing false sense of security. Second, unlike a well-defined precise game like Russian roulette, where the risks are visible to anyone capable of multiplying and dividing by six, one does not observe the barrel of reality. One is capable of unwittingly playing Russian roulette - and calling it by some alternative “low risk” game.”
"No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we are at dominating the odds, randomness will have the last word.”
“More generally, we underestimate the share of randomness in about everything, a point that may not merit a book—except when it is the specialist who is the fool of all fools. We seem to have evidence that what is called “courage” comes from an underestimation of the share of randomness in things rather than the more noble ability to stick one’s neck out for a given belief. In my experience (and in the scientific literature), economic “risk takers” are rather the victims of delusions (leading to overoptimism and overconfidence with their underestimation of possible adverse outcomes) than the opposite."
“Of course chance favors the prepared! Hard work, showing up on time, wearing a clean (preferably white) shirt, using deodorant, and some such conventional things contribute to success—they are certainly necessary but may be insufficient as they do not cause success.”
“It certainly takes bravery to remain skeptical; it takes inordinate courage to introspect, to confront oneself, to accept one's limitations."
"At any point in time, the richest traders are often the worst traders. This, I will call the cross-sectional problem: At a given time in the market, the most successful traders are likely to be those that are best fit to the latest cycle. This does not happen too often with dentists or pianists—because these professions are more immune to randomness.
The book is punchy at the start
Free audio copy right here
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