Learnings from The Bed of Procrustes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Some of my favorite quotes and takeways

"You exist if and only if you are free to do things without a visible objective, with no justification, and, above all, outside the dictatorship of someone else’s narrative."

"People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels—people you don’t want to resemble when you grow up."

"My only measure of success is how much time you have to kill."

"Men destroy each other during war; themselves during peacetime."

"You want to be yourself, idiosyncratic; the collective (school, rules, jobs, technology) wants you generic to the point of castration."

"The only definition of an alpha male: if you try to be an alpha male, you’ll never be one."

"You know you have influence when people start noticing your absence more than the presence of others."

"An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist or consultant the opposite."

"They will envy you for your success, your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status – but rarely for your wisdom."

"Over the long term, you are more likely to fool yourself than others."

"Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur."

"The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary."

"You can only convince people who think they can benefit from being convinced."

"Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed."

"They are born, then put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called 'work' in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they go to the gym in a box to sit in a box; they talk about thinking 'outside the box'; and when they die they are put in a box. All boxes, Euclidian, geometrically smooth boxes."

"I wonder if a lion (or a cannibal) would pay a high premium for free-range humans."

"A good book gets better on the second reading. A great book on the third. Any book not worth rereading isn’t worth reading."

"You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits."

"If you know, in the morning, what your day looks like with any precision, you are a little bit dead—the more precision, the more dead you are."

"By praising someone for his lack of defects you are also implying his lack of virtues."

"Erudition without bullshit, intellect without cowardice, courage without imprudence, mathematics without nerdiness, scholarship without academia, intelligence without shrewdness, religiosity without intolerance, elegance without softness, sociality without dependence, enjoyment without addiction, religion without tolerance, and, above all, nothing without skin in the game."

"Read nothing from the past one hundred years; eat no fruits from the past one thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years (just wine and water); but talk to no ordinary man over forty. A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty."

"You are free in inverse proportion to the number of people to whom you can’t say 'fuck you'. But you are honorable in proportion to the number of people to whom you can say 'fuck you' with impunity but don’t."

"It is better to be hated for who you are than loved for who you are not."

"To be truly free, one must first master oneself."