Where relevant, or inspired to do so, I’ve provided some additional commentary or linked to other ideas you might be familiar with (I have highlighted my commentary in bold and italicised quotes). Reading the book through the eyes of an entrepreneur, author and podcaster - someone playing in the sandpit that Taleb calls Extremistan, I have attempted to extract and capture some of the key lessons from this book. That was of course, until black swans were discovered off the coast of Western Australia in 1697 by Dutch explorers, demonstrating the fact that an absence of evidence does not equate to an evidence of absence.
Black Swans are said to explain almost everything about our world, but we, and that includes so-called experts, are blind to them.įor Centuries, the Old World agreed that all swans were white. Having been a fan of Taleb’s other books, Skin In The Game, and Anti-Fragile, I couldn’t wait to get into a book that I appreciated the underlying premise of, but had not yet read, that being The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.Īt the risk of sounding sensationalist, it is in my humble opinion, a must-read for entrepreneurs, students of decision-making and practitioners facing uncertainty.Ī Black Swan, Taleb says, is an event, positive or negative, that is deemed improbable yet causes massive consequences. He doesn’t shy away from naming names, and name-calling (or doing both at the same time), which is refreshing in a world of virtue-signallers and preference-falsifiers. Not only is Taleb a practitioner, but his writing style is humorous, and at times militant. I would take the words of a practitioner over a career academic any day, preferring instead to read Jeff Bezos’ shareholder letters of the Netflix culture deck, over some business book that a tenured professor, but not-once entrepreneur, turned over. He spent over twenty years as an options trader and risk analyst, and today has interests in venture capital. Not only has he written several best-selling books on decision-making, randomness and luck, but he, like so many great thinkers from across the ages (from Marcus Aurelius and Seneca during Roman times to Ray Dalio or Ben Horowitz today), is also a practitioner.
One of my favourite thinkers of the modern era would have to be Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
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