Only Nassim Taleb could write a book with nothing but aphorisms based on the Greek myth of a god who kept killing his guests by trying to lengthen or shorten them to the bed they slept in. His point is that we try to oversimplify the world into pithy truths…then he proceeds to provide hundreds of pithy truths for us to chew on.
Love Your Problems
You have calibrated life when most of what you fear has the titillating prospect of adventure. (Page 8)
Stop Caring About Your Physical Age
The only objective definition of aging is when a person starts to talk aging. (Page 10)
Fuck Ads
The book is the only medium left that hasn’t been corrupted by the profane: everything else on your eyelids manipulates you with an ad. (Page 20)
Stop Reading The News
To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers. (Page 21)
Haters Gonna Hate
For most, success is the harmful passage from the camp of the hating to the camp of the hated. (Page 27)
Maximize Your Unique Strengths
A genius is someone with flaws harder to imitate than his qualities. (Page 46)
Nothing Is Universal
There is nothing deemed harmful (in general) that cannot be beneficial in some particular instances, and nothing deemed beneficial that cannot harm you in some circumstances. The more complex the system, the weaker the notion of Universal. (Page 53)
Busy Just Means too Busy For You
Someone who says “I am busy” is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you. (Page 26)
Studying “Happiness” Is Absurd
I went to a happiness conference; researchers looked very unhappy. (Page 24)
Modern Complexity Outstrips Our Intuition
Our detection of false patterns is growing faster and faster as a side effect of modernity and the information age: there is this mismatch between the messy randomness of the information-rich current world, with its complex interactions, and our intuitions of events, derived in a simpler ancestral habit. Our mental architecture is at an increased mismatch with the world in which we live. (Page 106)