Nassim Nicholas Taleb Quotes

The important thing about security systems isn’t how they work, it’s how they fail.

In other words, by finding the anomalous event, what you do is you get out ahead of activities.

Nothing helps make a leader more approachable than admitting your struggles, screw-ups and behind-the-scenes thinking on hard calls. If the leader makes this a priority, the whole company will be more open and methodical learning from failure.

Why was so much done in remedying the evil instead of avoiding it in the first place?

It is axiomatic in politics that the earlier one addresses a problem, the more the alternatives and the easier the solutions.

We must solve problems before they occur, rather than scrambling to deal with crises after they erupt..

In any endeavor, you have to understand your tolerance for risk. What's a failure you can afford?

As a small business owner, you may not have the luxury to throw good money after bad, but if you can ascertain the 'why' of the failure, you can draw some significance from it and then turn it into something that clients will buy.

Every business makes big mistakes along the way.

I've really thought a lot about why other companies fail or succeed. I had to be a student of failure and find out why things went off the rails. I did that at a fairly deep level, and it's still something I do.

The person who failed often knows how to avoid future failures.

If you are armed with knowledge, if you are aware that certain dynamics are at play then you have options. You can play defense, you can ignore certain person and take the consequences perhaps with a game plan in mind and it goes on, you've increased your options.

Tomorrow always arrives. It is always different. And even the mightiest company is in trouble if it has not worked on the future. Being surprised by what happens is a risk that even the largest and richest company cannot afford, and even the smallest business need not run.

When times are bad is when you want to build! Why wait for things to pick up so everything will cost more?

He who fails to plan is planning to fail.

do you fix a wheel that isn't broken, or do you wait until the cart collapses?

If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you'll find this predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification.

It's bad policy to speculate on what you'll do if a plan fails when you're trying to make a plan work.

Failure's relative. I've always felt, even early on, if I lose the freedom to fail, something's not right about that. It's how you treat failure, too. There's something to learn from it. I've had movies that have failed colossally, so you kind of analyze your failures: What kind of failure was it? A failure because it's misunderstood by others? A failure because you misunderstood it yourself?

If you're smart, you abandon the things that didn't work out so well, and you enlarge upon the things that seem to be successful.

Delegation requires the willingness to pay for short term failures in order to gain long term competency.

You will only fail to learn if you do not learn from failing.

If you are going to have a risk-taking culture, you can't really look at every failure as a failure, you've got to be able to look at the failure as a learning opportunity.

Learn how to fail intelligently.

Failure is a resource that can be managed.