“After finding that disadvantaged groups consistently support the status quo more than advantaged groups, Jost and his colleagues concluded: “People who suffer the most from a given state of affairs are paradoxically the least likely to question, challenge, reject, or change it.”” (6)
“Justifying the default system serves a soothing function. It’s an emotional painkiller: If the world is supposed to be this way, we don’t need to be dissatisfied with it.” (7)
“The hallmark of originality is rejecting the default and exploring whether a better option exists.” (7)
“Although child prodigies are often rich in both talent and ambition, what holds them back from moving the world forward is that they don’t learn to be original. As they perform in Carnegie Hall, win the science Olympics, and become chess champions, something tragic happens: Practice makes perfect, but it doesn’t make new.” (9)
“Entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs had 33 percent lower odds of failure than those who quit. If you’re risk averse and have some doubts about the feasibility of your ideas, it’s likely that your business will be built to last. If you’re a freewheeling gambler, your startup is far more fragile.” (17)
“Polaroid founder Edwin Land remarked, “No person could possibly be original in one area unless he were possessed of the emotional and social stability that comes from fixed attitudes in all areas other than the one in which he is being original.”” (19)
“Having a sense of security in one realm gives us the freedom to be original in another.” (19)
“The biggest barrier to originality is not idea generation – it’s idea selection.” (31)
“Simonton finds that on average, creative geniuses weren’t qualitatively better in their fields than their peers. They simply produced a greater volume of work, which game them more variation and a higher chance of originality.” (35)
“If you want to be original, “the most important possible thing you could do,” says Ira Glass, the producer of This American Life and the podcast Serial, “is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work.” (37)
“Across fields, Simonton reports that the most prolific people nto only have the highest originality; they also generate their most original output during the periods in which they produce the largest volume.” (37)
“Many people fail to achieve originality because they generate a few ideas and then obsess about refining them to perfection.” (37)
“When artists assessed one another’s performances, they were about twice as accurate as managers and test audiences in predicting how often the videos would be shared.” (42)
“Our intuitions are only accurate in domains where we have a lot of experience.” (51)
“Physicists, accountants, insurance analysts, and chess masters – they all work in fields where cause-and-effect relationships are fairly consistent. But admissions officers, court judges, intelligence analysts, psychiatrists, and stock brokers didn’t benefit much from experience. In a rapidly changing world, the lessons of experience can easily point us in the wrong direction. And because the pace of change is accelerating, our environments are becoming ever more unpredictable.” (53)
“The more successful people have been in the past, the worse they perform when they enter a new environment. They become overconfident, and they’re less likely to seek critical feedback even though the context is radically different.” (54)
“When people sought to exert influence but lacked respect, others perceived them as difficult, coercive, and self-serving. Since they haven’t earned our admiration, we don’t feel they have the right to tell us what to do, and we push back.” (65)
“Francis Ford Coppola observed, “the way to come to power is not always to merely challenge the Establishment, but first make a place in it and then challenge and double-cross the Establishment.”” (66)
“Most of us assume that to be persuasive, we ought to emphasize our strengths and minimize our weaknesses. That kind of powerful communication makes sense if the audience is supportive. But when you’re pitching a novel idea or speaking up with a suggestion for change, your audience is likely to be skeptical. Investors are looking to poke holes in your arguments; managers are hunting for reasons why your suggestion won’t work. Under those circumstances, for at least for reasons, it’s actually more effective to adopt Griscom’s form of powerless communication by accentuating the flaws in your idea.” (69)
“The first advantage is that leading with weaknesses disarms the audience.” (69)
“If you’re perched at the top, you’re expected to be different and therefore have the license to deviate. Likewise, if you’re still at the bottom of a status hierarchy, you have little to lose and everything to gain by being original. But the middle segment of that hierarchy – where the majority of people in an organization are found – is dominated by insecurity.” (82)
“In the long run, research shows that the mistakes we regret are not errors of commission, but errors of omission. If we could do things over, most of us would censor ourselves less and express our ideas more.” (91)
“If you’re feeling pressured to start working on a creative task when you’re wide awake, it might be worth delaying it until you’re a little sleepier.” (97)
“People have a better memory for incomplete than complete tasks. Once a task is finished, we stop thinking about it. But when it is interrupted and left undone, it stays active in our minds.” (99)
“In the majority of circumstances, your odds of success aren’t higher if you go first. And when the market is uncertain, unknown, or underdeveloped, being a pioneer has pronounced disadvantages.” (108)
“The originals who start a movement will often be its most radical members, whose ideas and ideals will prove too hot for those who follow their lead.” (117)
“Simon Sinek argues that if we want to inspire people, we should start with why. If we communicate the vision behind our ideas, the purpose guiding our products, people will flock to us. This is excellent advice – unless you’re doing something original that challenges the status quo.” (124)
“For insiders, the key representative is the person who is most central and connected in the group… But for outsiders, the person who represents the group is the one with the most extreme views.” (128)
“The most promising ideas begin from novelty and then add familiarity.” (136)
“Instead of assuming that others share our principles, or trying to convince them to adopt ours, we ought to present our values as a means of pursuing theirs. It’s hard to change other people’s ideals. It’s much easier to link our agendas to familiar values that people already hold.” (140)
“Rob Minkoff explains: If it’s not original enough, it’s boring or trite. If it’s too original, it may be hard for the audience to understand. The goal is to push the envelope, not tear the envelope.” (141)
“Predicting personality is more challenging with only children than with children who have siblings. Like firstborns, only children grow up in a world of adults and identify with parents. Like lastborns, they are protected fiercely, which leaves them “free to become radicals themselves.”” (162)
“Reasoning communicates a message of respect… it implies that had children but known better or understood more, they would not have acted in an inappropriate way. It is a mark of esteem for the listener; an indication of faith in his or her ability to comprehend, develop, and improve.” (164)
“Parents of highly creative children had an average of less than one rule and tended to “place emphasis on moral values, rather than on specific rules.”” (164)
“When we praise children for their intelligence, they develop a fixed view of ability, which leads them to give up in the face of failure. Instead of telling them how smart they are, it’s wise to praise their effort, which encourages them to see their abilities as malleable and persist to overcome obstacles.” (169)
“The most inspiring way to convey a vision is to outsource it to the people who are actually affected by it.” (221)
“People are inspired to achieve the highest performance when leaders describe a vision and then invite a customer to bring it to life with a personal story. The leader’s message provides an overarching vision to start the car, and the user’s story offers an emotional appeal that steps on the accelerator.” (222)
“Merely knowing that you’re not the only resistor makes it substantially easier to reject the crowd. Emotional strength can be found even in small numbers.” (225)
“For more than a century, this was how status had worked in America. You made some money in one commercial enterprise or another, and then to solidify your social position and to distinguish yourself from others, you cultivated a distaste for the cheap amusements and common spectacles that made up the mass culture.” (17)
“The old cultural arbiters, whose job was to decide what was “good” in the sense of “valuable,” were being replaced by a new type of arbiter, whose skill was to define “good” in terms of “popular.”” (26)
“In the United States, making hierarchical distinctions about culture was the only acceptable way for people to talk openly about class.” (27)
“One of Tina’s gifts as an editor was that she saw the American cultural hierarchy for what it really was: not a hierarchy of taste at all, but a hierarchy of power that used taste to cloak its real agenda.” (32)
“He knew how little difference between the Hileses and the Seabrooks there really was – which was precisely why these cultural distinctions were so important. This was true all over America. No one wanted to talk about social class – it’s in poor taste, even among the rich – so people used High-Low distinctions instead. As long as this system existed, it permitted considerable equality between the classes. Strip away that old cultural hierarchy, and social relations between different socioeconomic levels were harsher, because they were only about money.” (46-47)
”From Wordsworth to Rage Against the Machine, art created for idealistic reasons, in apparent disregard for the marketplace, was judged superior to art made to sell. For the artist, it was not enough to have a gift for giving the people what they wanted; to insure fame, the artist had to pretend not to care what the people wanted. This was difficult to do, for the artist, of every type, is as desperate for public approval as any human being.” (68)
“Oscar Wilde wrote, “A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want. The moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or dishonest tradesman.” (69)
“MTV helped make rebelliousness and anti authoritarianism a mainstream commodity.” (89)
“The kind of pop-cultural fanship that seemed so unnatural to Nathanael West and Ray Bradbury is just everyday life in the 90s. Without pop culture to build your identity around, what have you got?” (96)
“The artists themselves, who had once taken orders from the producers, now took orders from the marketers.” (106)
“Ironically, while the artists had won the means of production, in the resulting cultural deluge they’d lost the means of getting the audience to notice them.” (106)
“George C. Wolfe told me, “The whole concept of the journeyman artist has disappeared. You are not allowed to go on a journey. There is no journey. You’re either extraordinarily brilliant or you’re dead.”” (109)
“The irony of Star Wars was that as a result of its success, a movie as fresh and unknowing as Star Wars couldn’t get made twenty years later.” (150)
“The marketing is the culture and the culture the marketing.” (153)
“In Nobrow, judgements about which brand of jeans to wear are more like judgments of identity than quality.” (170)
“The purpose (at The Pottery Barn) is to create a dominant, mainstream identity that’s too bland to be really unique, but is enough to make these mass-produced objects feel special.” (173)
“Jimmy Lovine told me, “We all know that David Geffen’s really smart and really talented, but he’s also not afraid, or if he is he doesn’t show it. He’s more than willing to put all the chips on something he really believes in. ANd that doesn’t exist in the record business anymore. Because most people are afraid for their jobs, of the impact someone else can have on them.” (189)
“Because Geffen was not afraid, he was greatly feared.” (190)
“”Money does corrupt,” Jackson Browne told me. “God, as soon as you have a lot of money, you’ve got to figure out how to stay in touch with what you write and why you write. And if you always had the idea that money was going ot make a difference in your life, now you have to contend with the idea that it doesn’t.”” (191)
(Disclosure: The publisher sent me a free, advance copy of this book. I don’t think it influenced what I found interesting, but who knows.)
“The strategy most often employed is this: Get an education. More competition? Get more education. More competition? Get some relevant experience. More competition? Get even more experience. But everyone else is adding experience at the same rate. Believing you can advance your career solely by celebrating another birthday does not seem a very sophisticated strategy for the twenty-first century. I asked John what the flaw of this approach was. He understood that the primary problem was that almost everyone else was doing it. The only way it could work is if you outlasted everyone: Career by endurance. “Think about the consequences,” I said. “As the situation becomes ever more competitive, you make yourself like everyone else? In what world would that make sense? You’ve essentially made yourself into a commodity, and one that’s interchangeable. And the commodity worker is bid down to the lowest price possible.” (13)
“In a competitive market, there will always be salespeople.” (18)
“This route (becoming a physician, lawyer, engineer, accountant) seems ideal to the immigrant parents who took substantial and personal risks to improve the lives of their children, who now are supposed to take no risks at all. Leaving aside the inconsistency of the approach (risk-taking parents who are surprised they raised risk-taking children), all the traditional professions are under siege by technology and global competition.” (27)
“Any particular skill set is subject to becoming obsolete with little notice.” (28)
“The only question that counts is, Have you achieved the best result? Not just a good or acceptable result. Did the investment hearn the highest reward open to you? IF not, you failed.” (33)
“Skill does matter… But it is not the starting place for the best use of talent. Passion is, and passion makes the highest skills possible.” (33)
“Relying on pure luck is an invitation to disaster. Most people will have to fight to find their way. They’ll have to earn it in a way the lucky will never fully appreciate. Indeed, for most, the path is filled with twists and turns. It’s hard. But so what? Again, the important point is that it’s worth it.” (40)
“Teachers know that the best students learn easily because they love the subject. “Easily” does not mean quickly; “easily” does not mean without frustration and errors. What it means is that these students are driven to find answers, to overcome whatever obstacle appears. They learn their subjects because they have to.” (58)
“Remember that a great career requires having impact. And to have impact in any of your passions, you must persist in one of them at a time.” (68)
“Anyone entering a competitive field – which is now almost all fields and will shortly be all fields – needs to stop just doing what all the other students and applicants are doing.” (78)
“If your passion leads you to be in a competitive field, the sooner you start thinking of a way you can stand out or distinguish yourself from the rest of the competition, the better and happier and more successful you’ll be. That doesn’t necessarily mean just being at the top of your class. It’s more about finding that perfect opportunity to apply your skills in a way that allows you to truly follow your passion.” (78)
“If all you can produce from your work is a good result, you’re not generating a competitive response. You’re no better than most everyone else. So why would you expect to get any special advantage? You have to develop an attribute beyond skill. This means you need to create solutions that are highly innovative, solutions that are found in few other places, if any.” (107)
“Unfortunately, we are no longer in an era of “good enough.” (110)
“All the other steps are in vain unless you can mount an effective marketing campaign for yourself. The good news is you don’t have to say, “I am so great! Look at me!” but instead you can say, “I have some great ideas – what do you think about these/” Because if a person or company loves your ideas, they will want you.” (125)
“Words define you to the world and to yourself.” (131)
“You are an entrepreneur. And your venture is yourself – it’s a venture that has to be defined, polished, and marketed. The truth is, successful ventures and successful careers are much closer together than you might have thought. So put your startup face on, and let’s learn how to pitch yourself.” (131)
“The goal of the pitch is to invite further dialogue, dialogue with a purpose.” (132)
“A good pitch should be 1. Short 2. Distinctive (“I do something others do not.”) 3. Expressed in a way that invites the listener to ask for more information” (133)
“The goal is to be precise about the body of work you wish to create.” (135)
“The same is true in networking/marketing sessions. THe relationship between the person advancing an idea and the person listening to the argument is tenuous. So Bart, in response to the listener’s vague expression of interest, needed first to solidify that interest, as did Violet. The best way to do that is to surprise the listener with a relevant fact, not an opinion. One of the fastest ways to impress anyone is to tell them something that’s much different from what they would have assumed. No you look interesting, not just your idea. The listener is implicitly wondering what other surprises will be revealed. Offer just one surprising fact, not a blizzard of them.” (136)
“We live in the Age of Victimization. We are all victims now. There are so many victims, in fact, it’s hard to find the oppressors.” (167)
“Harvard University helmed a study of 50,000 adults in 25 countries that showed that the daughters of working mothers had more education, were more likely to be employed and in supervisory roles, and had more robust incomes than daughters of stay-at-home mothers.” (173)
“By focusing only on your role as a parent, you have given up being a role model for your kids’ career life. The best thing to do is to lead by example, so that you are never in the situation where your child comes to talk to you about his dream job and you think, I had a dream once too, kid, but then you were born.” (174)
“A great career means that there’s not just one path available to you.” (177)
“Balance presumes that you spend your life in separate compartments labeled life and work, and you move time between them. I reject this goal. You should be trying to integrate your work and your life so each supports the other, making the whole stronger as a result.” (181)
“A great career means at the end of it and at the end of your life, you leave your mark behind. You leave your work behind to speak for you.” (187)
“IF she wanted to make a living at her passion, she needed to see herself in the context of what others would pay for her work. For many in the artistic and performing worlds, this is a radical thought.” (201)
“Just being competent, and being certified as competent, does not get you your job, which is especially true in a field where there are few openings.” (203)
“If you’re the child of an immigrant family that took great risk to leave a familiar place to resettle in a foreign land, recognize the sacrifice that your family made for your benefit. Of course, you are at liberty to point out their inconsistent position: that they want you to take no risk, even as they took a major risk.” (235)
“When your child is using his talent to its fullest, he is most likely to be both happy and successful.” (236)
“Truly confident people all had a similar trait: their confidence came from within and it did not have to be voiced. A nonchalant, matter-of-fact confidence is ideal.” (24)
“Competence is defined as the ability to do something, and confidence is defined as your belief about your competence.” (27)
“There are four levels of competence that people go through as they develop any skill. Those four levels are: unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence.” (28)
“Confident people make decisions rapidly and with a sense of finality. Once a decision is made, they are committed to it. They rarely change their minds. Confident people never waver because they know what they want.” (35)
“When you ask yourself, “how can I be of service to others today?” you will experience a paradigm shift of great proportions.” (39)
“A goal is a dream with a deadline.” (43)
“I encourage you to focus mostly on having a positive motivation strategy, allowing you to seek better things in your life. The most successful people have the positive motivation.” (51)
“Calling something “confidence” is actually a misnomer. There is only such a thing as acting confident or behaving in a confident way or thinking confident thoughts. The same goes for any emotion, be it fear, sadness, depression, or anxiety. None of these are actual “things.” They are the result of processes, sequences of thought that you run in your mind.” (59)
“Instead of saying “I feel sad,” describe for yourself what is really going on: “I choose to think in a certain way that results in my feeling sad when I encounter a certain set of circumstances.”” (61)
“Append “according to me at this time” onto every one of her sentences. This forces her to acknowledge that what she is describing is not absolute truth and not etched in stone for all time.” (63)
“Whenever there is an unwanted emotion (like fear, guilt, or anxiety), she must describe the emotion with the following phrase: “I choose to experience a certain emotion by doing something inside my mind that causes me to experience a set of pictures, sounds, and feelings that I collectively have labeled [emotion].” (63)
“After she restates it using the guidelines above, she must empower herself by using sentences that state how she will behave in the future. An example is: “Although I’ve done that in the past, I wonder how quickly I will find myself becoming more relaxed and confident when I go to ask the customers to purchase my product.” (63)
“When you change your language, you change your life.” (64)
“Ask yourself whether a particular belief serves you. If so, keep it. If the belief keeps you stuck in a station of your life that you’ve outgrown, get rid of it and replace it with a more empowering belief.” (67)
“If you have something positive that you want to experience more vividly, you can enlarge whatever you are visualizing – make it movie screen-size in your mind-and notice how that feeling becomes more intense. You can make that belief even more intense by making it brighter in your mind and picturing it being closer.” (69)
“The reverse is also true: If you want to make something less powerful, you can visualize it as being small, dark, and far away. To lessen the intensity even further, you can make the picture of what you’re thinking about grainy and black and white, as though you were viewing it on an ancient television screen.” (70)
“When you meet people and you want to create rapport, remember these beliefs: People automatically like you because you are a good person You can easily and naturally meet anyone you choose You can have instant rapport with anyone you choose using these techniques You have a lot in common with any person you meet You can learn something from each and every person you speak with” (77)
“In all interpersonal relations, assume that you can get and maintain a rapport. Operate under the belief that you have far more in common with the person than not, and you will easily connect with him or her.” (77)
“Ask yourself, “What would it be like if I were feeling unstoppably confident right now?” How would you feel different? How would you look out at the world as a supremely confident person?” (78)
“All friendships are based on: similarity, cooperation, praise.” (80)
“If you intend to connect with someone before beginning to talk with him or her, you will project that intent and that person will unconsciously pick up on it, responding to you more positively than he or she might have otherwise.” (82)
“When you set someone else’s comfort as one of your outcomes, that person will find himself or herself automatically more comfortable in your presence.” (82)
“Adopt the belief that people are perfectly friendly and they love meeting new, dynamic people such as yourself. Furthermore, recognize that you like to get to know new people, since you can learn something new from each and every person you meet. You accept people for who they are, allow them to be themselves, and are free from judging them. After permanently adopting this frame of mind, go out each day or night for the week and notice how easily and naturally you converse with strangers.” (82)
“When someone is genuinely comfortable in being himself or herself, others esense it and consequently let their guard down.” (83)
“All the happiest, most fulfilled, most successful people realize that success is a process. It’s the journey of who we become, not simply the end result, that makes it all worthwhile. The achievement of the goal is sweet. But, as with any goal worth achieving, there will likely be setbacks along the way. Viewing those setbacks in the right light can make the difference in your ultimate success.” (91)
“There is no such thing as failure; there are only results. After you’ve been knocked down, the only thing that matters is that you get back up.” (92)
“Masters become masters because they make more mistakes. The more mistakes you make, the more distinctions (small pieces of information you learn by doing) you’ll get. The more distinctions you have, the more easily you will reach your outcome.” (92)
“If at first you’re not successful, be thankful. Some of the least successful people out there had early successes and decided that there was no room for improvement; therefore they became complacent and stagnated.” (92)
“Compare this to people who fail royally the first few times. These late bloomers have to develop skills to adjust their behavior based on feedback. They tend to develop habits that lead them toward continual improvement. As they develop these habits and being to succeed, they eventually surpass the early bloomers in productivity.” (93)
“To get your victories to occur more often, just as soon as you have a major success, visualize yourself having the same results again in many different contexts.” (98)
“What makes the difference between successful, confident people and those who are tentative and do not pursue their dreams is the way that they view their mistakes. If you want to do something well, it’s worth doing poorly at first. That is why taking action is almost always better than not taking action. In taking action, you will either get your outcome or at least learn something, so that you can do things better the next time. If you fail to take action out of fear, you will learning nothing and stay stuck in the same place you were.” (99)
“Imagine what it would be like to be ten times more confident than you are now, and answer the following questions: How would you be moving differently? How would your body posture be different? How would your inner voice be different? How would you be speaking to others? What is going through your mind? How does your body feel? Where in your body do you feel that confidence first? How could you intensify that confident feeling in your body?” (105)
“Make a game of finding something positive in every situation. Ninety-five percent of your emotions are determined by how you interpret events to yourself.” -Brian Tracy (109)
“When you’re aware of the specific qualities of your negative internal voice, you can more easily silence it. Whose voice do you hear? Where does the voice seem to come from? At what level is the volume of the voice? Does the voice speak rapidly or slowly?” (111)
“Sometimes the negative internal voice is your own. What would happen if you took the voice and made it sound like, say, Mickey Mouse’s voice? It would be hard to take that high-pitched voice seriously, right?” (111)
“The more you reward yourself for acting in the way you want, the more you will find yourself automatically acting in the way you want. You won’t even have to make it a point to do so – it will simply become a reflex.” (112)
“Your ideal internal dialogue should be in your own voice. The reason for this is that you and you alone run your life and make the decisions.” (113)
“Words that are confidence killers: try, hope, but, would, could, should.” (116)
“The word try communicates a “maybe” attitude in a world that craves certainty. Instead, use the word do.” (117)
“If you want to communicate the same thing without using the word but, substitute the phrase and yet.” (118)
“Here are the words and phrases to add to your vocabulary for enhanced confidence: absolutely, definitely, positively, assuredly, without a doubt, of course, certainly, undoubtedly, obviously, guaranteed, naturally, sure.” (120)
“A classic placating gesture is when someone shrugs her shoulders with palms facing upward, as if pleading, “I didn’t do it.” This conveys a need to absolve oneself of responsibility for a situation. In order to have unstoppable confidence, you must avoid these gestures at all times. Another placating gesture is the shrug, which means that someone doesn’t really know what’s happening – or perhaps doesn’t even care.” (129)
“Keep your head held high, your shoulders back, your tummy tucked in, and move through the world with deliberate steps.” (131)
“Get in the habit of steepling your hands when you want to convey confidence to others.” (131)
“If you want more confidence, all you have to do is smile.” (131)
“Vividly imaging confidence in your future means you are literally programming yourself to have that confidence when you need it.” (143)
“Here is how to set yourself up to have confidence any time: Close your eyes Watch yourself on your mental movie screen being confident Enhance the visual and sound qualities of the movie Jump into your on-screen body and sse through your own eyes, hear what you hear, and feel that total confidence Hold your thumb and first finger together as you experience fondience The more you feel confident, the harder you press your thumb and first finger together After five seconds, separate your thumb and first finger and open your eyes Repeat the first seven steps, but watch a different confident scenario” (144)
“I imagined that I had an entire history of making wonderful speeches, motivating audiences, and receiving standing ovations for my abilities. To go one step further, I imagined people taking my message to heart, acting on it, and transforming their lives.” (161)
“Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.” (3)
“We can almost always detect antifragility (and fragility) using a simple test of asymmetry: anything that has more upside than downside from random events (or certain shocks) is antifragile; the reverse is fragile.” (5)
“We are witnessing the rise of a new class of inverse heroes, that is, bureaucrats, bankers, Davos-attending members and academics with too much power and no real downside and/or accountability. They game the system while citizens pay the price.” (6)
“You need perfect robustness for a crack not to end up crashing the system. Given the unattainability of perfect robustness, we need a mechanism by which the system regenerates itself continuously by using, rather than suffering from, random events, unpredictable shocks, stressors, and volatility.” (8)
“You cannot say with any reliability that a certain remote even tor shock is more likely than another, but you can state with a lot more confidence that an object or a structure is more fragile than another should a certain event happen.” (9)
“Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer.” (15)
“If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.” (15)
“the robust or resilient is neither harmed nor helped by volatility and disorder, while the antifragile benefits from them.” (17)
“The sword of Damocles represents the side effect of power and success: you cannot rise and rule without facing this continuous danger – someone out there will be actively working to topple you.” (34)
“Fiscal deficits have proven to be a prime source of fragility in social and economic systems.” (36)
“For society, the richer we become, the harder it gets to live within our means. Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.” (42)
“When I was a pit trader, I learned that the noise produced by the person is inverse to the pecking order: as with mafia dons, the most powerful traders were the least audible. One should have enough self-control to make the audience work hard to listen, which causes them to switch into intellectual overdrive.” (43)
“Loss of bone density and degradation of the health of the bones also causes aging.” (58)
“Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury.” (64)
“Some parts on the inside of a system may be required to be fragile in order to make the system antifragile as a result.” (66)
“Evolution is not about a species, but at the service of the whole of nature.” (69)
“When you are fragile, you depend on things following the exact planned course, with as little deviation as possible – for deviations are more harmful than helpful. This is why the fragile needs to be very predictive in its approach, and, conversely, predictive systems cause fragility.” (71)
“If every plane crash makes the next one less likely, every bank crash makes the next one more likely. We need to eliminate the second type of error – the one that produces contagion – in our construction of an ideal socioeconomic system.” (73)
“A loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn’t introspect, doesn’t exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on.” (74)
“Natural and naturelike systems want some overconfidence on the part of individual economic agents, i.e., the overestimation of their chances of success and underestimation of the risks of failure in their businesses, provided their failure does not impact others. In other words, they want local, but not global, overconfidence.” (75)
“People have difficulty realizing that the solution is building a system in which nobody’s fall can drag others down – for continuous failures work to preserve the system. Paradoxically, many government interventions and social policies end up hurting the weak and consolidating the established.” (76)
“This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is risky, that it is a bad thing – and that eliminating randomness is done by eliminating randomness.” (84)
“The problem is that by creating bureaucracies, we put civil servants in a position to make decisions based on abstract and theoretical matters, with the illusion that they will be making them in a rational, accountable way.” (89)
“We can also see from the turkey story the mother of all harmful mistakes: mistaking the absence of evidence (of harm) for evidence of absence, a mistake that we will see tends to prevail in intellectual circles and one that is grounded in the social sciences.” (93)
“When a currency never varies, a slight, very slight move makes people believe that the world is ending. Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system. Indeed, confusing people a little bit is beneficial – it is good for you and good for them. For an application of the point in daily life, imagine someone extremely punctual and predictable who comes home at exactly six o’clock every day for fifteen years. You can use his arrival to set your watch. The fellow will cause his family anxiety if he is barely a few minutes late. Someone with a slightly more volatile – hence unpredictable – schedule, with say, a half -our variation, won’t do so.” (101)
“Stability is not good for the economy: firms become very weak during long periods of steady prosperity devoid of setbacks, and hidden vulnerabilities accumulate silently under the surface – so delaying the crises is not a very good idea.” (101)
“In a computer simulation, Alessandro Pluchino and his colleagues showed how adding a certain number of randomly selected politicians to the process can improve the functioning of the parliamentary system.” (104)
“Absence of political instability, even war, lets explosive material and tendencies accumulate under the surface.” (105)
“The problem with artificially suppressed volatility is not just that the system tends to become extremely fragile; it is that, at the same time, it exhibits no visible risks.” (106)
“While we now have a word for causing harm while trying to help (iatrogenics), we don’t have a designation for the opposite situation, that of someone who ends up helping while trying to cause harm.” (113)
“We tend to over-intervene in areas with minimal benefits (and large risks) while under-intervening in areas in which intervention is necessary, like emergencies.” (119)
“It’s much easier to sell “Look what I did for you” than “Look what I avoided for you.” Of course a bonus system based on “performance” exacerbates the problem.” (121)
“The more data you get, the less you know what’s going on.” (128)
“Political and economic “tail events” are unpredictable, and their probabilities are not scientifically measurable. No matter how many dollars are spent on research, predicting revolutions is not the same as counting cards; humans will never be able to turn politics and economics into the tractable randomness of blackjack.” (133)
“Warren Buffett tries to invest in businesses that are “so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will.”” (137)
“People are cruel and unfair in the way they confer recognition, so it is best to stay out of that game.” (148)
“You can’t predict in general, but you can predict that those who rely on predictions are taking more risks, will have some trouble, perhaps even go bust. Why? Someone who predicts will be fragile to prediction errors.” (150)
“To become a successful philosopher king, it is much better to start as a king than as a philosopher.” (152)
“Stoicism, seen this way, becomes pure robustness – for the attainment of a state of immunity from one’s external circumstances, good or bad, and an absence of fragility to decisions made by fate, is robustness. Random events won’t affect us either way (we are too strong to lose, and not greedy to enjoy the upside).” (153)
“Success brings an asymmetry: you now have a lot more to lose than to gain.” (154)
“For my last job, I wrote my resignation letter before starting the new position, locked it up in a drawer, and felt free while I was there.” (155)
“If you have more to lose than to benefit from events of fate, there is an asymmetry, and not a good one.” (157)
“I initially used the image of the barbell to describe a dual attitude of playing it safe in some areas (robust to negative Black Swans) and taking a lot of small risks in others (open to positive Black Swans), hence achieving antifragility. That is extreme risk aversion on one side and extreme risk loving on the other, rather than just the “medium” or the beastly “moderate” risk attitude that in fact is a sucker game (because medium risks can be subjected to huge measurement errors).” (161)
“Antifragility is the combination aggressiveness plus paranoia.” (161)
“In risky matters, instead of having all members of the staff on an airplane be “cautiously optimistic,” or something in the middle, I prefer the flight attendants to be maximally optimistic and the pilot to be maximally pessimistic or, better, paranoid.” (162)
“Georges Simenon, one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century, only wrote sixty days a year, with three hundred days spent “doing nothing.” He published more than two hundred novels.” (165)
“The worst side effect of wealth is the social associations it forces on its victims, as people with big houses tend to end up socializing with other people with big houses. Beyond a certain level of opulence and independence, gents tend to be less and less personable and their conversation less and less interesting.” (174)
“No one at present dares to state the obvious: growth in society may not come from raising the average the Asian way, but from increasing the number of people in the “tails,” that small, very small number of risk takers crazy enough to have ideas of their own, those endowed with that very rare ability called imagination, that rarer quality called courage, and who make things happen.” (180)
“The story of the wheel on the suitcase also illustrates the point of this chapter: both governments and universities have done very, very little for innovation and discovery, precisely because, in addition to their blinding rationalism, they look for the complicated, the lurid, the newsworthy, the narrated, the scientistic, and the grandiose, rarely for the wheel on the suitcase. Simplicity, I realized, does not lead to laurels.” (190)
“We see a high degree of academic research in countries that are wealthy and developed, leading us to think uncritically that research is the generator of wealth.” (197)
“Academia is well equipped to tell us what it did for us, not what it did not – hence how indispensable its methods are.” (200)
“Serious empirical investigation shows no evidence that raising the general level of education raises income at the level of a country. But we know the opposite is true, that wealth leads to a rise of education.” (203)
“I am not saying that for an individual, education is useless: it builds helpful credentials for one’s own career – but such effect washes out at the country level.” (204)
“Yogi Berra said, “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.”” (213)
“An idea does not survive because it is better than the competition, but rather because the person who holds it has survived!” (215)
“He wondered ‘how traders could handle these complicated exotics if they do not understand the Girsanov theorem… Nobody worries that a child ignorant of the various theorems of aerodynamics and incapable of solving an equation of motion would be unable to ride a bicycle.” (218-219)
“I wondered if I was living on another planet or if the gentleman’s PhD and research career had led to this blindness and his strange loss of common sense – or if people without practical sense usually manage to get the energy and interest to acquire a PhD in the fictional world of equation economics.” (219)
“Traders trade -> traders figure out techniques and products -> academic economists find formulas and claim traders are using them -> new traders believe academics -> blowups (from theory-induced fragility)” (220)
“Practitioners don’t write; they do. Birds fly and those who lecture them are the ones who write their story. So it is easy to see that history is truly written by losers with time on their hands and a protected academic position.” (220)
“We don’t put theories into practice. We create theories out of practice.” (221)
“A patent side effect of mathematics is making people over-optimize and cut corners, causing fragility. Just look how the new is increasingly more perishable than the old.” (223)
“Do not invest in business plans but in people.” (238)
“Find a problem first, and figure out the math that works for it, rather than study in a vacuum through theorems and artificial examples, then change reality to make it look like these examples.” (247)
“Much of what other people know isn’t worth knowing.” (248)
“To this day I still have the instinct that the treasure, what one needs to know for a profession, is necessarily what lies outside the corpus, as far away from the center as possible.” (248)
“There is this error of thinking that things always have a reason that is accessible to us – that we can comprehend easily.” (249)
“We practitioners and quants aren’t too fazed by remarks on the part of academics – it would be like prostitutes listening to technical commentary by nuns.” (264)
“What is fragile is something that is both unbroken and subjected to nonlinear effects – and extreme, rare events, since impacts of large size (or high speed0 are rarer than ones of small size (and slow speed).” (270)
“In spite of what is studied in business schools concerning “economies of scale,” size hurts you at times of stress; it is not a good idea to be large during difficult times.” (279)
“Someone with a linear payoff needs to be right more than 50 percent of the time. Someone with a convex payoff, much less. The hidden benefit of antifragility is that you can guess worse than random and still end up outperforming.” (299)
“Being fooled by randomness is that in most circumstances fraught with a high degree of randomness, one cannot really tell if a successful person has skills, or if a person with skills will succeed – but we can pretty much predict the negative, that a person totally devoid of skills will eventually fail.” (303)
“I once testified in Congress against a project to fund a crisis forecasting project. The people involved were blind to the paradox that we have never had more data than we have now, yet have less predictability than ever.” (307)
“As shown from the track record of prophets: Before you are proven right, you will be reviled; after you are proven right, you will be hated for a while, or what’s worse, your ideas will appear to be “trivial” thanks to retrospective distortion.” (310)
“For the perishable, every additional day in its life translates into a shorter additional life expectancy. For the nonperishable, every additional day may imply a longer life expectancy.” (318)
“In general, the older the technology, not only the longer it is expected to last, but the more certainty I can attach to such a statement.” (319)
“We confuse the necessary and the causal: because all surviving technologies have some obvious benefits, we are led to believe that all technologies offering obvious benefits will survive.” (321)
“A writer with arguments can harm more people than any serial criminal.” (384)
“Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation. Just ask them what they have – or don’t have – in their portfolio.” (389)
“Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference.” (389)
“The Romans removed the soldiers incentive to be a coward and hurt others thanks to a process called decimation. If a legion loses a battle and there is suspicion of cowardice, 10 percent of the soldiers and commanders are put to death, usually by random lottery.” (392)
“Myles Burnyeat provides the example of a philosopher who puzzles about the reality of time, but who nonetheless applies for a research grant to work on the philosophical problem of time during next year’s sabbatical – without doubting the reality of next year’s arrival.” (394)
“Only he who has true beliefs will avoid eventually contradicting himself and falling into the errors of postdicting.” (397)
“My experience is that most journalists, professional academics, and other in similar phony professions don’t read original sources, but each other, largely because they need to figure out the consensus before making a pronouncement.” (399)
“Marketing beyond conveying information is insecurity.” (403)
“We accept that people who boast are boastful and turn people off. How about companies? Why aren’t we turned off by companies that advertise how great they are?” (404)
“A simple solution, but quite drastic: anyone who goes into public service should not be allowed to subsequently earn more from any commercial activity than the income of the highest paid civil servant. It is like a voluntary cap (it would prevent people from using public office as a credential-building temporary accommodation, then going to Wall Street to earn several million dollars).” (412)
“More data means more information, perhaps, but it also means more false information.” (416)
