The Black Swan

[From the book "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon"]

“The scholar argues that people are wired to see patterns in chaos while remaining blind to unpredictable events, with massive consequences. Experimentation and empiricism trumps the easy and obvious narrative,” Stone writes.

Nassim Taleb's "The Black Swan" made me completely rethink my understanding of "risk".

Life is governed by chance, even if we humans like to think of ourselves as in control by retroactively explaining things that happened in the past.

And throw in “The Black Swan” and “Fooled by Randomness”.

“Fragile” means if you hit something might break.

“Resilient” means if you hit something, it will stay the same.

On my podcast Nassim discusses “Antifragility” – building a system, even on that works for you on a personal level, where you if you harm your self in some way it becomes stronger.

That podcast changed my life

He discusses Antifragility throughout history, up to our current economic situation, and even in our personal situations.

The Black Swan - realising that Life happens beyond one's control. But also that serendipitous encounters are real if only we open our eyes to them.

I’m not sure that’s the goal of the book but it helped me understand the random characteristic of entrepreneurship. Although the author applies it more to finance and research, it explains how some very rare events have disproportionate consequences and how we can’t predict them. I think success in entrepreneurship is the result of a lot of factors and not just hard work. So it might not be very positive and motivating but in a way it allowed me to have this perspective at a time where we highlight lots of successful entrepreneurs and don’t necessary see all the failures.