Top 50 Quotes From The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable is a 2007 book by author and former options trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The book focuses on the extreme impact of rare and unpredictable outlier events—and the human tendency to find simplistic explanations for these events, retrospectively. Taleb calls this the Black Swan theory.

The book is part of Taleb’s five volume series, titled the Incerto, including Fooled by Randomness (2001), The Black Swan (2007–2010), The Bed of Procrustes (2010–2016), Antifragile (2012), and Skin in the Game (2018).

A central idea in Taleb’s book is not to attempt to predict Black Swan events, but to build robustness to negative events and an ability to exploit positive events. Taleb contends that banks and trading firms are vulnerable to hazardous Black Swan events and are exposed to losses beyond those predicted by their defective financial models.

The book asserts that a “Black Swan” event depends on the observer: for example, what may be a Black Swan surprise for a turkey is not a Black Swan surprise for its butcher. Hence the objective should be to “avoid being the turkey”, by identifying areas of vulnerability in order to “turn the Black Swans white”.

The book has been described by The Sunday Times as one of the twelve most influential books since World War II. As of 2019, it has been cited approximately 10,000 times, 9,000 of which are for the English-language edition. The book spent 36 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List;17 as hardcover and 19 weeks as paperback. It was published in 32 languages.

The Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman wrote “The Black Swan changed my view of how the world works” and explains the influence in his own 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Top 50 Best Quotes From The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Before the discovery of Australia, people in the old world were convinced that all swans were white, an unassailable belief as it seemed completely confirmed by empirical evidence. […] It illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observations or experience and the fragility of our knowledge. One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans. All you need is one single (and, I am told, quite ugly) black bird.” – ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“A Black Swan […] is an event with the following three attributes. First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird’s belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race “looking out for its best interests,” as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief.*” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“It is my great hope someday, to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known. Namely that our highest currency is respect.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“If you hear a “prominent” economist using the word ‘equilibrium,’ or ‘normal distribution,’ do not argue with him; just ignore him, or try to put a rat down his shirt.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“We tend to use knowledge as therapy.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Ideas come and go, stories stay.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?” and the others – a very small minority – who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries,” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“If you survive until tomorrow, it could mean that either a) you are more likely to be immortal or b) that you are closer to death.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“I will repeat the following until I am hoarse: it is contagion that determines the fate of a theory in social science, not its validity.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“I am most often irritated by those who attack the bishop but somehow fall for the securities analyst–those who exercise their skepticism against religion but not against economists, social scientists, and phony statisticians. Using the confirmation bias, these people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquisition and various religious wars. But they will not show you how many people were killed by nationalism, social science, and political theory under Stalin or during the Vietnam War. Even priests don’t go to bishops when they feel ill: their first stop is the doctor’s. But we stop by the offices of many pseudoscientists and “experts” without alternative. We no longer believe in papal infallibility; we seem to believe in the infallibility of the Nobel, though….” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“I don’t run for trains.” Snub your destiny. I have taught myself to resist running to keep on schedule. This may seem a very small piece of advice, but it registered. In refusing to run to catch trains, I have felt the true value of elegance and aesthetics in behavior, a sense of being in control of my time, my schedule, and my life. Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking. You stand above the rat race and the pecking order, not outside of it, if you do so by choice.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“If you want to get an idea of a friend’s temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“I propose that if you want a simple step to a higher form of life, as distant from the animal as you can get, then you may have to denarrate, that is, shut down the television set, minimize time spent reading newspapers, ignore the blogs. Train your reasoning abilities to control your decisions; nudge System 1 (the heuristic or experiential system) out of the important ones. Train yourself to spot the difference between the sensational and the empirical. This insulation from the toxicity of the world will have an additional benefit: it will improve your well-being.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves. So I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or “incentives” for skill. The strategy is, then, to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many Black Swan opportunities as you can.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“You need a story to displace a story.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“We grossly overestimate the length of the effect of misfortune on our lives. You think that the loss of your fortune or current position will be devastating, but you are probably wrong. More likely, you will adapt to anything, as you probably did after past misfortunes.”― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“This idea that in order to make a decision you need to focus on the consequences (which you can know) rather than the probability (which you can’t know) is the central idea of uncertainty.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“The next time someone pesters you with unneeded advice, gently remind him of the fate of the monk whom Ivan the Terrible put to death for delivering uninvited (and moralizing) advice. It works as a short-term cure.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Humans will believe anything you say provided you do not exhibit the smallest shadow of diffidence; like animals, they can detect the smallest crack in your confidence before you express it. The trick is to be as smooth as possible in personal manners. It is much easier to signal self-confidence if you are exceedingly polite and friendly; you can control people without having to offend their sensitivity.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“We humans are the victims of an asymmetry in the perception of random events. We attribute our successes to our skills, and our failures to external events outside our control, namely to randomness.”― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“The Black Swan asymmetry allows you to be confident about what is wrong, not about what you believe is right.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“When you walk the walk, whether successful or not, you feel more indifferent and robust to people’s opinion, freer, more real.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“I know that history is going to be dominated by an improbable event, I just don’t know what that event will be.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“A life saved is a statistic; a person hurt is an anecdote. Statistics are invisible; anecdotes are salient.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Living on our planet, today, requires a lot more imagination than we are made to have. We lack imagination and repress it in others.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Our human race is affected by a chronic underestimation of the possibility of the future straying from the course initially envisioned (in addition to other biases that sometimes exert a compounding effect). To take an obvious example, think about how many people divorce. Almost all of them are acquainted with the statistic that between one-third and one-half of all marriages fail, something the parties involved did not forecast while tying the knot. Of course, “not us,” because “we get along so well” (as if others tying the knot got along poorly).” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Look into your own existence. Count the significant events, the technological changes, and the inventions that have taken place in our environment since you were born and compare them to what was expected before their advent. How many of them came on a schedule? Look into your own personal life, to your choice of profession, say, or meeting your mate, your exile from your country of origin, the betrayals you faced, your sudden enrichment or impoverishment. How often did these things occur according to plan?” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“So you become numb to insults, particularly if you teach yourself to imagine that the person uttering them is a variant of a noisy ape with little personal control. Just keep your composure, smile, focus on analyzing the speaker not the message, and you’ll win the argument. An ad hominem attack against an intellectual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“One useful trick, I discovered, is to avoid listening to the question of the interviewer, and answer with whatever I have been thinking about recently. Remarkably, neither the interviewers nor the public notices the absence of correlation between question and answer.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Pasteur said, like all great discoverers, he knew something about accidental discoveries. The best way to get maximal exposure is to keep researching. Collect opportunities–” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“We favor the sensational and the extremely visible. This affects the way we judge heroes. There is little room in our consciousness for heroes who do not deliver visible results—or those heroes who focus on process rather than results.”― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory, we are not likely to change our minds….” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Hunger (or episodic energy deficit) strengthens the body and the immune system and helps rejuvenate brain cells, weaken cancer cells , and prevent diabetes.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Evidence shows that we do much less thinking than we believe we do—except, of course, when we think about it.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“It is not what you are telling people, it is how you are saying it.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.” Statistics stay silent in us.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Just as we tend to underestimate the role of luck in life in general, we tend to overestimate it in games of chance.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Those who believe in the unconditional benefits of past experience should consider this pearl of wisdom allegedly voiced by a famous ship’s captain: But in all my experience, I have never been in any accident… of any sort worth speaking about. I have seen but one vessel in distress in all my years at sea. I never saw a wreck and never have been wrecked nor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort.”– E. J. Smith, 1907, Captain, RMS Titanic Captain Smith’s ship sank in 1912 in what became the most talked-about shipwreck in history.*” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it. This is all the more worrisome when we engage in deadly conflicts: wars are fundamentally unpredictable (and we do not know it). Owing to this misunderstanding of the causal chains between policy and actions, we can easily trigger Black Swans thanks to aggressive ignorance-like a child playing with a chemistry kit.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“Prediction requires knowing about technologies that will be discovered in the future. But that very knowledge would almost automatically allow us to start developing those technologies right away. Ergo, we do not know what we will know.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

On AMAZON: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

ALL OTHER TOP QUOTES ARTICLES

LAST ARTICLES:

6 Interesting Facts and Best 40 Quotes From Martin Luther King Jr.

60 Insightful Quotes From The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge

100 Powerful Quotes From President Russell M. Nelson

The 90 Best Warren Buffett Quotes

38 Quotes From Start With No by Jim Camp

Top 50 Quotes From The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Top 30 Quotes (and Tips) From Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker

Success and Failure: What Bill Gates Learned and 23 Inspiring Quotes

80 Top Quotes From Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb