“The curse of modernity is that we are increasingly populated by a class of people who are better at explaining than understanding, or better at explaining than doing.”
“Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions.”
“You can define a free person precisely as someone whose fate is not centrally or directly dependent on peer assessment.”
“If you do not take risks for your opinion, you are nothing.”
“For studying courage in textbooks doesn’t make you any more courageous than eating cow meat makes you bovine. By some mysterious mental mechanism, people fail to realize that the principal thing you can learn from a professor is how to be a professor—and the chief thing you can learn from, say, a life coach or inspirational speaker is how to become a life coach or inspirational speaker. So remember that the heroes of history were not classicists and library rats, those people who live vicariously in their texts. They were people of deeds and had to be endowed with the spirit of risk taking”
“No person in a transaction should have certainty about the outcome while the other one has uncertainty.”
“Those who talk should do and only those who do should talk.”
“The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything,
“Alexander said that it was preferable to have an army of sheep led by a lion than an army of lions led by a sheep.”
“Finally, when young people who “want to help mankind” come to me asking, “What should I do? I want to reduce poverty, save the world,” and similar noble aspirations at the macro-level, my suggestion is: 1) Never engage in virtue signaling; 2) Never engage in rent-seeking; 3) You must start a business. Put yourself on the line, start a business.”
“Courage is the only virtue you cannot fake.”
“Start by being nice to every person you meet. But if someone tries to exercise power over you, exercise power over him.”
“It is no secret that large corporations prefer people with families; those with downside risk are easier to own, particularly when they are choking under a large mortgage.”
“How much you truly “believe” in something can be manifested only through what you are willing to risk for it.”
“People who are bred, selected, and compensated to find complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb,
Skin in the Game: The Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life