{"id":9165,"date":"2021-10-15T19:38:21","date_gmt":"2021-10-15T19:38:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.flaneurlife.com\/?p=9165"},"modified":"2023-12-04T15:25:39","modified_gmt":"2023-12-04T15:25:39","slug":"frases-nassim-taleb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.flaneurlife.com\/es\/nassim-taleb-quotes\/","title":{"rendered":"70 Frases Nassim Taleb sobre finanzas, vida y antifragilidad"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Nassim Taleb is a world-renowned writer, philosopher, and statistician. He’s also something of an enigma. In addition to being the author of best-selling books like The Black Swan and Antifragile, he’s also a former hedge fund manager and derivatives trader.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So what does this modern day renaissance man have to say about life? Keep reading to find out in this blog post where we’ve compiled 70 of his most insightful observations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nassim Taleb Quotes<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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[A flaneur is] someone who, unlike a tourist, makes a decision opportunistically at every step to revise his schedule (or his destination) so he can imbibe things based on new information obtained.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary. <\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

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Love without sacrifice is like theft. <\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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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. <\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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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 \u201cWow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?\u201d 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\u2019t 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. <\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success<\/a> others expect from you is only painful if that\u2019s what you are seeking. <\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/strong><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

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Half of the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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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. <\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or lost. <\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking. <\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

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What I learned on my own I still remember.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry. <\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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Things always become obvious after the fact.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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They will envy you for your success, your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status – but rarely for your wisdom. <\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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Freedom<\/a> is always associated with risk taking, whether it leads to it or comes from it.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

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Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness. <\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels – people you don’t want to resemble when you grow up.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns).<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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Remember that you are a Black Swan. <\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad — at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity. <\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

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The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication – this “nerdification,” to put it bluntly – is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally. <\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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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.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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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. <\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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A prophet is not someone with special visions<\/a>, just someone blind to most of what others see.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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If you have more than one reason to do something (choose a doctor or veterinarian, hire a gardener or an employee, marry a person, go on a trip), just don\u2019t do it. It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something. Obvious decisions (robust to error) require no more than a single reason. <\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

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If there is something in nature you don’t understand, odds are it makes sense in a deeper way that is beyond your understanding. So there is a logic to natural things that is much superior to our own. Just as there is a dichotomy in law: ‘innocent until proven guilty’ as opposed to ‘guilty until proven innocent’, let me express my rule as follows: what Mother Nature does is rigorous until proven otherwise; what humans and science do is flawed until proven otherwise.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient<\/a> resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. <\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words \u2018impossible\u2019, \u2018never\u2019, \u2018too difficult\u2019 too often, drop him or her from your social network.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns).<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

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The curious mind embraces science; the gifted and sensitive, the arts; the practical, business; the leftover becomes an economist.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don\u2019t take risks<\/a>, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand, nothing.<\/p>\nNassim NicholasTaleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg didn\u2019t finish college. Too much emphasis is placed on formal education \u2013 I told my children not to worry about their grades but to enjoy learning.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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I select a very small number of things to be sceptical about, such as markets, and on these I am hypersceptic. But I want to be fooled by randomness in art. I want the ceremonial of religion; we are made for it.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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You may not know in your mind where you are going, but you know it by doing.<\/p>\nNassim Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

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We have this culture of financialization. People think they need to make money with their savings rather with their own business. So you end up with dentists who are more traders than dentists. A dentist should drill teeth and use whatever he does in the stock market for entertainment.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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If you are an Arabic-speaking, Greek-Orthodox going to a French school it makes you deeply sceptical if you have to listen to three different accounts of the Crusades \u2013 one from the Muslim side, one from the Greek side and one from the Catholic side.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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Nature builds things that are antifragile. In the case of evolution, nature uses disorder to grow stronger. Occasional starvation or going to the gym also makes you stronger, because you subject your body to stressors and gain from them.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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Doctors most commonly get mixed up between absence of evidence and evidence of absense.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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Difficulty is what wakes up the genius.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

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The complex world, the notion of \u2019cause\u2019 itself is suspect; it is either nearly impossible to detect or not really defined\u2014another reason to ignore newspapers, with their constant supply of causes for things.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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Religion isn\u2019t so much about telling man that there is one God as about preventing man from thinking that he is God.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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When you ask people, \u2018What\u2019s the opposite of fragile?,\u2019 they tend to say robust, resilient, adaptable, solid, strong. That\u2019s not it. The opposite of fragile is something that gains from disorder.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

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Medieval man was a cog in a wheel he did not understand; modern man is a cog in a complicated system he thinks he understands. <\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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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.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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People have the problem of denial. This is one of the things I learned in Lebanon. Everybody who left Beirut when the war started, including my parents, said, \u2018Oh, its temporary.\u2019 It lasted 17 years! People tend to underestimate the gravity of these situations. That\u2019s how they work.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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True humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others; the rest is either shyness or good marketing.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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The fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn\u2019t care too much.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

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If you want to get an idea of a friend\u2019s 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.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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The imagination of the genius vastly surpasses his intellect; the intellect of the academic vastly surpasses his imagination.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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When you write, you don\u2019t have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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In social policy, when we provide a safety net, it should be designed to help people take more entrepreneurial risks, not to turn them into dependents. This doesn\u2019t mean that we should be callous to the underprivileged.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us.<\/p>\nNassim NicholasTaleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

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I no longer care about the financial system. I gave them my roadmap. OK? Thanks, bye. I\u2019ve no idea what\u2019s going on. I\u2019m disconnected. I\u2019m totally disengaged.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you\u2019d need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don\u2019t have anything like that.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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If you hear a \u201cprominent\u201d economist using the word \u2018equilibrium,\u2019 or \u2018normal distribution,\u2019 do not argue with him; just ignore him, or try to put a rat down his shirt.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

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Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad \u2014 at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has a simple heuristic. Never ask the doctor what you should do. Ask him what he would do if he were in your place. You would be surprised at the difference.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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It\u2019s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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It is no secret that large corporations prefer people with a family; those with downside risk are easier to own, particularly when they are choking under a large mortgage.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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When you walk the walk, whether successful or not, you feel more indifferent and robust to people\u2019s opinion, freer, more real.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

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We should probably stop trading derivatives, anything more complex than regular options \u2026 I am an options trader, and I don\u2019t understand options. How do you want a regulator to understand them?.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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Practitioners are usually too busy practitioning to write books, articles, papers, speeches, equations, theories and get honored by Highly Constipated and Honorable Members of Academies).<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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By definition, what works cannot be irrational; about every single person I know who has chronically failed in business shares that mental block, the failure to realize that if something stupid works (and makes money), it cannot be stupid.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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My lesson from Soros is to start every meeting at my boutique by convincing everyone that we are a bunch of idiots who know nothing and are mistake-prone, but happen to be endowed with the rare privilege of knowing it.<\/p>\nNassim Nicholas Taleb<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

A Final Word<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Nassim Taleb<\/a> is a fascinating thinker and true flaneur with plenty of wisdom to share on life, wealth and becoming antifragile. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Have any other Nassim Taleb quotes you\u2019d add to the list? Which is your favorite? Leave us a comment below \u2013 we\u2019d love to hear from you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You might also enjoy these related quote collections:<\/p>\n\n\n\n