Nightfall - Isaac Asimov & Robert Silverberg

 Of course it is. But Athor reminded me of the old philosophical chestnut of Thargola's Sword. Which we use - methaphorically, I mean - to smite the more complex premise, when we're trying to decide between two hypotneses. It's simpler to go looking for a dark sun than it is to have to produce an entirely new Theory of Universal Gravitation.

The stock market has crashed three separate times, or haven't you noticed? Sensible investors dont really believe the world is coming to an end, but they think other investors might start to think so, and so the smart ones sell out before the panic begins - thus touching off the panic themselves. And then they buy back afterward, and sell again as soon as the market rallies, and begin the whole downward cycle all over again.

no amount of smooth talk was persuasive enough to break through barriers that were so determinently maintained. He had long ago decided that no worthwhile woman could ever be seduced; you could present the possibility to them, but you had to leave it ultimately to them to do the seducing for you, and if they weren't so minded, there was very little you could do to change their outlook.

It had been a pretty good world, he thougth. Not perfect, far from it, but good enough. Most people had been reasonably happy, most were prosperous, there was progress being made on all fronts - toward deeper scientific understanding, toward greater economic expansion, toward stronger global cooperation. The concept of war had come to seem quatntly medieval and the age-old religious bigotries were mostly obsolete, or so it had seemed to him.

Ricardo Semler - The seven day weekend

• Relentlessly asking "Why" into deep levels
• Soon enough there are no easy, comfortable answers
• This explosion of technology means we must re-gain the time we've lost to the merging of personal and work life. People should be allowed and encouraged to re-arrange their week, drop the traditional notion of a weekend, and divide the seven days among company time, personal time and idleness
• Enjoy a sunny Monday on the beach after working through a chilly Sunday
• If I insist on standard work hours, I may be sacrificing a certain amount of employee potential every day. By encouraging uniformity, I lose productivity.
• Punctuality is a mind-set. It has no relation to watches.
• Stress is the difference between your expectation and reality.
• The list of stressful activities includes going on vacation - theres the expectation that it will be perfect, of how many things need to be arranged before you leave. Not to speak of the stress when you are about to return, and start to fret over the work or mail or errands awaiting you. No wonder there is so much shouting at airport counters.
• Another source of stress and disappointment is the expectation that the workplace is an extended family.
• The fact is, you dont have to like people to work with them.
• Organizations make it possible for employees to feel exhilaration once in a while. Let them get invovled to the point that they shout "yes!" and give each other High Fives because they did it their way - and it worked.
• If the people Arent motivated, they dont need to sign up for motivation training - they need a different job!
• Its human nature to lose interest in anything after time!
• People cannot be passionate about doing the same thing over and over. That particularly true about companies that are highly departmentalized. Even more so if the company spells out job parameters.
• Companies need to understand that interests tend to be cyclical. At Semco we offer incentives to employees to move around different jobs and departments.
• Employees need the latitude to try sifferent jobs because man of them emerge from an educatino system that compels them to make career and training choices at a very young age, when they have little information about professions and no experience.
• Thos who stick around simply learn to live with boredom. But thats a huge waste of human potential.
• We are of the opinion that assembling special people is more difficult than finding something for them to do- or, as is our case - letting them find something profitable to do. Wed become famous for hiring people without having a job for them
• Sales! people would exclaim - he has never sold a pencil in his life! Thats what qualifies him, I would insist. We need to find new ways to sell, and make more solid pitches to customers.
• A human resources department once had 90 people. We decided the department really had no reason to exist. … They blossomed because manager are uncomfortable dealing with personnel issues.

Surely you must be joking mr feynman

• I don”t know whatš the matter with people: they don”t learn bz understanding: hez learn by some other way - by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile.
• The electron is a theory that we use< it is so useful in understanding the way nature works that we can almost call it real.
• And, just like it should in all stories about philosophers, it ended up in complete chaos.
• So while all the biology guys were trying to understand these new things *atoms, physics, mathematics, statistics), I could spend my time learning the biology part.
• One day he told me to stay after class. “Feynman,”, he said, “you talk too much and you make too much noise. I know why. You/re bored. So I’m going to give you a book. You go up there in the back, in the corner, and study this book, and when you know everything, thats in the book, you can talk again. He gave me the real works - Advanced Calculus - it was for junior or senior course in college.
• “what can i do to stop them from coming to my larder without killing the ants? No poison, you gotta be humane to the ants.”What I did was this: in preparatin, I put a bit of sugar about six or eight inches from their entry point into the room, that they didnt know about. Then I made those ferry things again, and whenever an ant returning with food walked onto my little ferry, Id carry him over and put him on the sugar. Any ant coming toward the larder that walked onto a ferry I also carried over to the sugar. Eventually the ants found their way from the sugar to their hole, so this new trail was being goubly reinforced, while the old trail was being used less and less. I knew that after half an hour or so the old trail would dry up, and in an hour they were out of my larder. I didnt wash the floor: I didnt do anything but ferry ants.
• In other words, the experimental physicistst had nothing to do until their buildings and apparatus were ready, so they just built the buildings - or assisted in building the buildings.
• You musty have been in a situation like this when you didnt ask them right away. Right away it would have been OK. But now theyve been talking a little bit too long. You hesitated to long. If you ask them now theyll say, “What are you wasting my time all this time for?”
• Well, Mr Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers noe knows about. Its a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you pley with them. They are so wonderful. You ahve theses switches - if its an even number you do this, if its an odd number you do that - and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate things if you are clever enough, on one machine. After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasnt paying any attention: he wasnt supervising anybody. … But if youve ever worked with comoputers, you understand the disease - the delight in being able to see how much you can do.
• Special engineers - clever boys from high school. Thez would tell them nothing. They came to work on IBM machines - punching holes, numbers that they didnt understand. Nobody told them what it was. The thing was going very slowly. I said that the first thing there has to be is that these echnical guys know what were doing. They were all excited: “Were fighting a war! We see what it is!”... Nearly ten times as fast. (If you work for a purpose)
• Then the son totld me what happened. The last ttime he was there, Bohr said to his son, Remember the name of that little fellow in the back over there? Hes the only guy whos not afraid of me, and will say when Ive got a crazy idea. So nnext time when we watnt to discuss ideas, were not going to be able to do it with these guys who say everyghing is yes, yes, Dr Bohr. Get that guy and well talk with him first.
• The next time I went to Oak Ridge, all the secretaries and people who knew who I was were telling me, “Dont come through here. Dont come through here!”The colonel had sent a note around to everyone in the plant which said, “During his last visit, was Mr Feynman at any time in your office, near your office, or walking through your office?” 
• I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing. Whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with. Id invent things and play with things for my own entertainment. … so i got this new attitude. Ill never accomplish anything. Ive got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoz, and just like I read the Arabian Night for pleasure, Im going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.
• Ok he says. The whole principle is this: The guy wants to be a gentleman. He doesnt want to be thought of as imploite, crude, or especially a cheapskate. As long as the girl knows the guys motives so well, its easy to steeer him in the direction she wants him to go. Therefore, he continued, under no circumstance be a gentleman. You must disrespect the girls. Furthermore, the very first tule is, dont buy a girl anything / not even a package of cigarettes / until youve asked her if shell sleep with tou, and youre conviced that she will, and that shes not lying.
• One day, about 3:30 in the afternoon, I was walking along the sidewalk opporsite the beach at Copacabana past a bar. I suddenly got thit TreMENdous, strong feeling:” Thats just what I want: thathll fit just right. Id just love to have a drink right now. I started to walk into the bar, and I suddenly thought to myself. Wait a minute! Its the middle of the afternoon. Theres nobodz here. Theres no social reason to drink. Why do you have such a terribly strong feeling that you have to have a drink? - and I got scared. I never drank ever again, since then. I suppose I really wasnt in any danger, because I found it very easy to stop. But that strong feeling that I didnt understand frightened me. You see, I get such fun out of thinking that I dont want to destroy this most pleasant machine that makes life such a big kick.
• Then, as now, Las Vegas made its money on the people who gamble, so the whole problem for the hotels was to get people to come there to gamble. So they had shows and dinners which were very inexpensive / amost free. You didnt have to make any reservations for anything: You could walk in, sit down at one of the many empty tables, and enjoy the show. It was just wonderful for a man who didnt gamble, because I was enjozing all the advantages - the rooms were inexpensive, the meals were next to nothing, the shows were good, and I liked the girls.
• The first time I was in Las Vegas I sata down and figured out the odds for everything, and I discovered that the odds for the crap table were something like .493. If I bet a dollar, it would only cost me 1.4 cents. So I thought to myself. “Why am I so reluctant to bet? It hardly costs anything!” So I started betting, and right away I lost five dollars in succession - one, two, three, four, five. I was supposed to be out only seven cents< instead, I was five dollars behind! Ive never gambled since then. Im very lucky that I started off loosing.
• But I decided then to never decide again. Nothing - absolutely nothing - would ever change my mind again. When youre young, you have all these things wo worry about - should you go there, what about your mother, And you worry and try to decide, but then something else comes up. Its much easier to just plain decide. Never mind - nothing is goinog to change your mind. I did that once when I was a student at MIT. I got sick and tired of having to decide what kind of dessert I was going to have at the restaurant, so I decided it would always be chocolate ice cream, and never worried about it again - I had the solution to that problem.
• And the reason that nobody got anywhere in that conference was that they hadnt clearly defined the subject of … and tehrefore no one knew exactly what they were supposed to talk about.
• Somewhere on the second day the stenotypist came up to me and said, “What profession are you? Surely not a professor.” “I am a professor,” I said. “Of what?” “Of Physics - science.” “Oh, that must the reason.” he said. “Reason for what?” He said, “You see, Im a stenotypist, and I ytpe everything that is saaid here. Now, when the other fellas talk, I type what they say, but I dont understand what theyre saygin. But every time you get up to ask a question or to say something, I understand exactly what you mean - what the question is, and what youre saying - so I thtought you cant be a professor.
• There were a lot of fools at that conference - pompous fools - and pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are all right: you can talk to them, and try to help them out. But pompous fools - guys who are fools and are covering it all over and impressing people, as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus - THAT I CANNOT STAND!
• It turned out the other members of the commitee had done a lot of work in giving out the books and collecting reports, and had gone to sessins in which the book publishers would explain the books before they read them: I was the only guy on that comission who read all the books and didnt get any informatin from the book publishers except what was in the books themselves, the things that would ultimatelz go to the schools.
• The ambassador answered in a way I like to hear> “I dont know, he said. I might suppose something, but I dont know if its true.

The Tao of Charlie Munger - David Clark

• He decided that each day he would devote one hour of his time at the office to work on his own real estate projects (90/60/1 rule)
• I succeeded because I have a long attention span
• I think that, every tiem you see the word EBITDA, you should substitute the word “bullshit earnings.” … Charlie considers interest, depreciation, and taxes to be very real expenses that have to be paid.
• If you want accurate numbers from financial companies, youre in the wrong world
• Derivates hide risks
• never set aside any reserves to cover its losses
• risk exposure
• Charlies lessno here is that a combination of supersmart people and large amounts of leverage often ends in disaster.
• The economic reality of the hedge fund business model makes it madness for hedge funds to do anything but leverage up and throw the dice.
• “All of humanitys problems stem from mans inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
• Waiting, for most investors, is no tan easy thing to do.\
• Applies to mutual and hedge fund managers, hey are driven to produce quarterly results.
• When Charlie and Warren say that they intend to hold an investment forever, they mean forever
• View a stock as an ownership of the business and judge the staying quality of the business in terms of its competitive advantage.
• it it has a durable competitive aadvantage, he will keep an eye on it in the hope that at some future date it will be selling at a bargain price or even a fair price.
• Companies that have manufactured the same product or provided the same service for fifty or more years.
• Its the strong swimmers who drown
• Strong swimmers are the ones who swim way out and potentially get themselves in trouble. Weaker swimmers stay close to shore, where it is safe.
• How do we know when the stock market is too high? When the financial press starts writing articles about how Charlie and Warren have lost their Midas touch.
• Thats contrary to human nature, just to sit there all day long doing nothing, waiting. … For an ordinarz person, can you imagine just sitting for five years doing nothing? You dont feel active, you dont feel useful, so you do something stupid.
• Greedy bankers: Mortgage lending became a dirty way to make money. You take people that cant handle credit and try to make very high returns by abusing and encouraging their stupidity - thats not the way I want to make money in banking. You should try to make money by selling people things that are good for the customer. … In the old days banks kept home mortgages on their own books, so they were very careful whom they loaned money to. But then the business model changed and banks started selling the mortgages they wrote to other companies. It no longer mattered whom they loaned money to, because they were oing to sell off the mortgage as soon as they wrote it.
• I dont think anyone should buy a bank if they dont have a feel for the bankers. Banking is a business that is a very dangerous place for an investor. Without deep insight, stay away
• As Warren says, if you get into a card game and you cant figure out who is the patsy, you are the patsy.
• Inflation is the friend of people who own assets. Inflation is also he enemy of the people who own cash or bonds.
• It wasnt greed that drove our grandparents to work so hard, it was the fear that they wouldnt be able to pay the rent and their family would go gunfray. Today that fear is gone. It has been replaced with a sense of entitlement that demands that health care be free, that a college education be free, that freee food and housing be provided if one is out of work.
• I do not think you can ttrust tbankers to control themselves. They are like heroin addicts.
• Bankers can destroy themselves and an entire nations economz. Bankers are entrusted with an enormous amount of other peoples money and should be conservative in investing it.
• About trading with derivatives> Its like having thousands of professional poker players. What damn good are they doing for anybody?
• A carry trade is the borrowing of large amounts of money at one rate and using it to buy an asset that earns a higher rate of return.
• all of Berkshires business have in common> Keep costs low.\
• Berkshire itself> Doesnt have a public relations or investor services department and for many years the annual report was printed on the cheapest paper possible and had no expensive color photos.
• A great business at a fair price is superior to a fair business at a great price.
• the product was the same year after year. The business required very little in capital expenditures, so it was possible to take money out of it every year to invest in other businesses.
• From Carl von Clausewitz: No war plan outlasts the first encounter with the enemy.
• Strategz of decentralization frees Berkshires subsidiary managers - the people with the best knowledge - to adapt their businesses to the economic environment as they see fit, without being meddled with by a less knowledgeable home office. It also allows Charlie and Warren to avoid the financial costs and inefficiencies of running a large corporate bureaucracy.
• Spend each day trying to be a little wiser. One inch at a time, day by day.
• He implemented a self/educatin regime for one hour a day
• The compounding effect of knowledge
• The best way to get a good spouse is to deserve a good spouse.
• Extreme specialization is the way to succeed.
• Its specialists who make the big bucks - everyone else, the little bucks
• Just keep thinking and reading, and you will be all right
• That is all there is to the investment game
• you think a lot, and you read a lot
• Overspending can make us miserable.
• Oh, its just so useful dealing with people you can trust and getting all the others the hell out of your life.
• In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didnt read all the time - none, zero. Youd be amazed att how much Warren reads - and how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think Im a book with a couple legs sticking out.
• Thats what manhood is, taking life as it falls. Not whining all the time annd trying to fix it by whining.
• I dont think its terribly constructive to spend your time worrying about things you cant fix
• I constantly see people rise in life who are nott tthe smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a litlle wiser than they were when they got up, and boy, does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.
• compounding our intellect.
• Thomas Edison:”I failed my way to success.”

Be here now

• About a guru
• "dont think about the past. Just be here now"
• "Dont think about the future. Just be here now"
• "Emotions are like waves. Watch them dissapear in the distance on the vast calm ocean."
• He wasnt the least bit interested in all of the extraordinary dramas that I had collected.
• Once you realize God knows everything, youre free. ... I had managed to keep private places in my head. ... And suddenly I realized that he knew everything that was going on in my head, all the time, and taht he still loved me. Because wo we are is behind all that.
• So: I can do nothing for you but work on myself... You can do nothing for me but work on yourself
• Sadhana: youve got to be quiet inside to do that kind of photography. Its very easy to photograph inanimate objects - like other people. But: Turn the lens right in on the very stuff youre hiding in. Shoot the camera this way.
• Making it sacred - this (shopping wood and carrying water) is karma yoga ... the yoga of daily life. The way to do it is: so what you do but dedicate the fruits of the work to me.
• People often say to me: I would really like to do sadhana... I am a teacher now. If I could only finish being a teacher, i could so sadhana. BAloney! You're either doing sadhana or youre not. Sadhana is a full tim thing that you do because there is nothing else to do. You do it whether youre teaching, or sitting in a monastery, whether youre lying in bed, going to the toilet, making love, eating, everything is part of waking up.... its all dedicated ... its all sacred
• you meet another person and there are qualities in that personality which offend you, seduce you, repel you, sexually excite you,....... It's only when you can see through all that veil... through all your own desires ... that you can see beyond all that to where THE OTHER BEING IS. You will do that when youve gone inside to see where you are
• You are the guru. Thats whats so far out. You are your own guru. And thats what you finally know when you are hanging out with one of these guys. You hang out with yourself. 
• When you wake up at 3:47
• What time is it? NOW
• Where am I? HERE
• When you get up at 9 a.m.
• What time is it? NOW
• Where am I? HERE
• Try 4:32 three weeks from next Thursday
• What time is it? NOW
• Where am I? HERE
• By God - is it - there's no getting away from it - thats the way it is. Thats the eternal present. You finally figure out that its only the clock thats going around... Its doing it thing but you - youre sitting HERE - RIGHT NOW - ALWAYS
• Nobody is going anywhere
• Nobody is coming from anywhere
• We're all here
• We're all here
• In eternal time & space
• We're always going to be here
• Nothing to do - there is nowhere to go and there is nothing to do
• Just the process of calming, centering, centering, calming - extricating myself from the drama
• So long as one feeld that he is the doer he cannot escape from the wheel of births and deaths
• Drama is drama is drama is drama
• desire is drama
• thought is drama
• breathing is drama
• emotions are drama
• all form is drama
• It's all part of the drama
• Everywhere I look I see only my own desires
• Go to bed early and get up early
• Meditate for a few minutes before lying down to go to sleep
• Get out of the habit of "thinking about things" when you are going into sleep. Clear your mind
• Asanas are positions. Once you have gotten into the position and made the statement connected with that position you are there. You become a statue in each asana. The statue image is a useful one. No matter how unusual the position of the asana may seem to you, once you are in the position then you become totally centered in that position. It - your body - comes to be a position of rest... as if you were always in that position, as a statue.
• Your state of mind is of paramount importance in asanas. Dont identify with the ego who is doing the asanas. Merely watch the body move into the appropriate positions. Stay in a place inside yourself where nothing is happening at all.
• When the body has gotten into the asana as perfectly as it is able without forcing (just firm pressure)... then go into "neutral" with the body so that it becomes perfectly relaxed and stable in the position of the asanas.
• You can make up other mantras for other daily acts to bring to consciousness your center so that you break the identification with an ego who is performin the act.
• The witness
• You play many roles in the course of a day - and that WHO YOU ARE from moment to moment changes. There is the angry you, and the kind you, the lazy you, - hundreds of different yous. If, as we have seen, the work is to break these identifications, we can work effectively throughout each day by making each of these "you's" objects, i.e. by breaking the identification with each of them. 
• The witness
• It is a part of the rational mind. 
• The witness could be thought of as an eye. It is not an active thing. It just sees it all happening.
• The witness is not evaluative. It does not judge your actions. It merely notes them. Thus, if you perfom an act because of desire, such as eating something the witness would merely note a) he is eating such-and-such and b) he is putting himself down for eating such-and-such. Thus the witness has noted a "you" of desires and a super-ego you ... two "you's"
• At first the witness is adoped because of an intellectual understanding of the need to separate the Self from the Doer
• It is difficult to fully get lost in the subtle sensual gratifications of eating when you are witnessing yourself eat. "He is chewing...testing..savoring, etc. It all seems so dispassionate. And truly it is
• You will also note that as you break identification with more and more of your roles and begin to live more calmly in the witness, that you begin to be aware of much more.
• Meditation
• The human mind is like that monkey, incessantly active by its own nature, then it becomes drunk with the wine of desire, thus increasing its turbulence.
• All that you do is register thoughts, states, etc. in the present
• You dont think about your thoughts. You merely note them.
• At first let your mind wander and just watch it. Just note how your mind works. Dont think about the thoughts. Just note them. Do this for about thirty minutes a day for a week.
• Let all other thoughts drift by and keep your attention focused on this muscle. (breathing)
• Count - Om...2...Om...3...
• Your only task is to count that muscle going up and down. All other thoughts dont belong here. 
• Note the intruding thought, give it a label, and return to the task at hand.
• This simple technique of bare attention is very powerful.

Louis V. Gerstner jr. – Who says Elephants can’t dance?

Louis V. Gerstner jr. – Who says Elephants can’t dance?

• “It is not helpful to feel sorry for ourselves. I’m sure our employees don’t need any rah-rah speeches. We need leadership and a sense of direction and momentum, not just from me but from all of us. I don’t want to see a lot of prophets of doom around here. I want can-do people looking for short-term victories and long-term excitement.”
• I told them there was no time to focus on who created our problems. I had no interest in that. “We have little time to spend on problem definition. We must focus our efforts on solutions and actions.”
• Management principles
• I manage by principle, not procedure
• The market place dictates everything we do
• I look for people who work to solve problems and help colleagues. I sack politicians
• I am heavily involved in strategy; the rest is yours to implement. Just keep me informed in an informal way. Don’t hide bad information. Solve problems laterally; don’t keep bringing them up the line.
• Move fast. I f we make mistakes, let them be because we are too fast rather than too slow.
• Hierarchy means very little to me. Let’s put toether in meetings the people whi can help solve a problem.
• 5 ninety-day priorities upon start:
• Stop hemorrhaging cash
• Make sure we would be profitable in one years time
• Develop and implement a key customer strategy for year 1 and 2
• Finish right-sizing by the beginning of third quarter
• Develop an intermediate term business strategy
• Plus a thirty days assignment:
• Ten-page report from each BU leader
• I stepped to the table and, as politely as I could in front of his team, switched of the projector. After a long moment of awkward silence, I simply said, “Let’s just talk about your business”.
• I told the team that, effective immediately, the milking strategy was over and instructed them to get back to me with an aggressive price reduction plan
• When people realized that I really did read every one of the reports (from big clients problems to be solved from visiting them), there was quick improvement in action and responsiveness
• Turning around troubled companies, whatever hard or painful things you have to do, do them quickly and make sure everyone knows what you are doing and why.
• Sooner is better than perfect
• The real issue was going out and making things happen every day in the marketplace
• With an eye to the old management committee, I also announced what the CEO would not do: It would not accept delegation of problem solving. It would not sit through presentations or make decisions for the business units. Its focus would be solely on policy issues that cut across multiple units.
• No institutional transformation takes place, I believe, without a multi-year commitment by the CEO to put himself or herself constantly in front of employees and speak in plain, simple, compelling language
• This is about the bone-jarringly difficult task of forcing the organization to limit its ambition and focus on markets that made strategic and economic sense.
• I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game – it is the game. An organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.
• My kind of executives dig into the details, work the problems day to day, and lead by example, not title.
• A good portion of our success was due to all of the deals we didn’t do
• People do what you inspect, not what you expect
• Companies don’t like to change because individuals don’t like to change
• I have always believed that it is better to underpromise and outperform than to overpromise and underperform

Charles Dickes – A tale of two cities

Charles Dickes – A tale of two cities

• From the foreword: Quoting from Charles Dickens memorandum book the outline for a character: “The man who is incapable of his own happiness. One who is always in pursuit of happiness”
• A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.
• “I am a man of business. I have a business charge to acquit myself of. In your reception of it, don’t heed me any more than if I was a speaking machine – truly, I am not much else.”
• “A multitude of people, and yet a solitude”

Fooled by Randomness - Nassim Taleb

• It is as simple as that: Past events will always look less random than they were (it is called the hindsight bias) I would listen to somehone's discussion of his own past realizing that much of what he was saying was just backfit explanations concocted ex post by his delutet mind.
• Probability is not a mere cmoputation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance. Outside of textbooks and casinos, probability almost never presents itself as a mathematical problem or a brain teaser.
• I spend all my career attacking the quantitative use of propability
• Let me make it clear here: 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. The same applies to the conventional values of persistence, doggedness and perseverance: necessary, very necessary. One needs to go out and buy a lottery ticket in order to win. Does it mean that the work involved in the trip to the store caused the winning? Of course skills count, but they do count less in highly random environments than they do in dentistry.
• That all millionaires were persistent, hardworking people does not make persistent hard workers become millionaires: Plenty of unsuccessful entrepreneurs were persistent, hardworking people.
• Clearly risk taking is necessary for large success - but it is also neccessary for failure. Had the author done the same study on bankrupt citizens he would certainly have found a predilection for risk taking.
• It is a mistake to use, as journalists and some economists do, statistics without logic, but the reverse does not hold: It is not a mistake to use logic without statistics.
• Most journalists do not take things too seriously: After all, this business of journalism is about pure entertainment, not a search for truth, aprticularly when it comes to radio and television.
• Regrettably, some people play the game too seriously, they are paid to read too much into things. All my life I have suffered the conflict between my love of literature and poetry and my profound allergy to most teachers of literature and "critics". Te French thinker and poet Paul Valery was surprised to listen to a commentary of his poem that found meanings that had until then escaped him (of course, it was pointed out to him that these were intended by his subconscious)
• Probability theory is a young arrival in mathematics; probability applied to practice is almost nonexistent as a discipline.
• Needless to say that the ideas of this book fall sqwuarely into the Tragic category: We are faulty and there is no need to bother trying to correct our flaws. We are so defective and so mismatched to our environment that we can just work around these flaws.
• Work ethics draw people to focus on noise rather than the signal
• He is extremely rich on the average of lives he could have led - he takes so little risk. [...] He protects himself from the rare event. [...] Arguably, in expectation, a dentist is considerably richter than the rock musician who is driven in a pink Rolls Royce [...] For one cannot consider a professino without taking into account the average of the people who enter it, not the sample of those who have succeeded in it.
• An event that has already taken place has 100% probability, i.e. certainty
• When you look at the past, the past always be deterministic, since only single observation took place. [...] While we know that history flows forward, it is difficult to realize that we envision it backward.[...] Those, who are very good at predicting the past will think of themselvey as good at predicting the future.
• If there is anything better than noise in the mass of "urgent" news pounding us, it would be like a needle in a haystack. People do not realize that the media is paid to get your attention. For a journalist, silence rarely surpasses any word.
• It takes a huge investment in introspection to learn that the thirty or more hours spend "studying" the news last month neither had any predictive ability during your activities of that month, neither had any predictive ability during your activities of that month nor did it impact your current knowledge of the world.
• Over one year we observe roughly 0.7 parts noise for every one part performance. Over one month 2,32 for 1, one hour 30 to 1, one second 1796 to 1. [...] I deal with it by having no access to information. [...] If an event is important enough, it will fnid its way to my ears. [...] Why I prefer not to read the newspaper.
• Finally, this explains why people who look too closely at randonmness burn out, their emotions drained by the series of pangs they experience. [...] negative effect for an average loss (then mostly by noise) to be up to 2.5 the magnitude of a positive one (also here from noise))
• Let us remember that economists are evaluated on how intelligent they sound, not on a scientific measure of their knowledge of reality.
• Investors and businesses are not paif in probabilities, they are paid in dollars. Accordingly, it is not how likely an event is to happen that matters, it is how much is made when it happens that should be the consideration.
• The best description of my lifelong business in the market is "skewed bets", that is, I try to benefit from rare events that do not tend to repeat themselves frequently, but, accordingly, present a large payoff when they occur. I try to make money infrequently, as infrequently as possible, simply because I believe that rare events are not fairly valued, and that the rarer the event, the more undervalued it will be in price. In addition to my own empiricism, I think that the counterintuitive aspect of the trade (and the fact that our emotional wiring does not accomodate it) gives me some form of advantage.
• The agent would prefer the number of losses to be low and the number of gains to be high, rather than optimizing the total performance.
• No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.
• There is a severe aspect of naive empiricism. I can use data to disprove a proposition, never to prove one. I can use history to refute a conjecture, never to affirm it.
• The Astologist can always find a reason to fit the past event, by saying that Mars was probably in line but not too much so.
• In other words those that have failed do not show up in the sample. (...) By living on Park Avenue, one does not have exposure to the losers, one only sees the winners.
• The social treadmill effect: You get rich, move to rich neighborhoods, then become poor again. To that add the psychological treadmill effect, you get used to wealth and revert to a set point of satisfaction. This problem of some people never really getting to feel satisfied by wealth.
• Real randomness does not look random
• You may study for a year and learn nothing, then, unless you are disheartened by the empty results and give up, something will come to you in a flash. (...) Those who go the extra mile are rewarded.(...) Most people give up before the reward.
• Better to be loved by a dozen than liked by the hundreds.
• Recall that the accomplishment from which I derive the most pride is my weaning myself from television and the news media.
•  The so-called attribution bias. You attribute your successes to skills, but your failures to randomness.
• The findings that 80 to 90% of people think that they are above the average in many things.
• How to behave:
• Dress at your best
• Leave a good impression
• Try not to blame others for your fate
• Never exhibit any self-pity
• Do not complain
• The only article Lady Fortuna has no control over is your behavior