Book Tracker

"It's the possibility of having a dream come true that make's life interesting."

They say that you always read a book when you most need to. It's hard to say now, but I think this is especially true here. I would say this is a book about faith more than anything else. Do you have faith that what you are doing is moving you towards your goal? If not, perhaps it is because you don't have a goal; I think most of us fall in this category. But for the rest, perhaps you just need the nudge to start pursuing your dreams.

Overall, it is a philosophy towards life that I take out of this. I think it was his intention to not give too much in the way of precise methods or rules, but instead impart a general philosophy that is directionally correct, and I think he accomplished this well. I hope to be a practictioner of this brand of decision-making.

The most important lesson for me, is that you can take advantage of Black Swans if you position yourself correctly. Just as there are negative Black Swans, there are positive ones too. So, in most areas, we should try to limit our exposure to things that appear "safe"--if there is a high cost of failure, just because it is predictable, doesn't mean it is safe against negative Black Swans. Instead, focus on things are unpredictable but have extremely high upside (ie. startups), and things that are extremely low risk and highly predictable (ie, treasuries). Not medium risk, mostly predictable things that are actually much more dangerous than what appears on the surface.

The only problem I have about the ideas in this book is that it seems a bit nihilistic. Black Swans, both positive and negative, however unpredictable, always do have a cause. Particularly with positive Black Swans, people have the ability to will them into existence. The future was made by people who spawn in positive Black Swans, not people who wait passively and take advantage of them. But as he says, the forward process of making these things happen is almost impossible to take any repeatable lessons from, so it is forgiveable that bringing this is left as an exercise for the reader.