Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see

The narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship, upon them. Explanations bind facts together. They make them all the more easily remembered; they help them make more sense. Where this propensity can go wrong is when it increases our impression of understanding.

Learn to fail with pride - and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error - by mastering the error part.

If one puts an infinite number of monkeys in front of typewriters, and lets them clap away, there is a certainty that one of them will come out with an exact version of the 'Iliad.'

The central idea in The Black Swan is that: rare events cannot be estimated from empirical observation since they are rare.

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.