Picking Nuggets

The Book of Elon

1 month ago | [YT] | 74

Picking Nuggets

🟠 The Green Lumber Fallacy (by Nassim Taleb):

There is a story in both Antifragile and Skin in the Game, of a fellow who lost a million dollars trading green lumber.

He knew everything about green lumber. Everything! The economics, the mathematics, the statistics, collected data, everything…

And [yet] lost a million dollars.

And [he] wrote an account: What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars. And he reports that there's a fellow, a pit trader — I don't know if you've met pit traders, but they look like pit traders and they act like pit traders. And the fellow is making tons of money with green lumber and had been doing so consistently. Now, the narrator discovers that the fellow [who] made a lot of money on green lumber thought it was lumber painted green. He didn't know it was freshly cut lumber.

So, is it that that person knew nothing about lumber?

No. He knew a lot of stuff, but not necessarily what you think from the outside is valuable.

So, when you have skin in the game, you tend to know a lot of stuff about business, about things, that you wouldn't guess you need to know from the outside. And this is very hard to explain. This is why machine learning is successful, because machine learning has no ideas. It learns from the inside, not from the outside.

👉 full blogpost here - www.littlealmanack.com/p/green-lumber-fallacy

4 months ago | [YT] | 172

Picking Nuggets

🟠 Nassim Taleb:

Success in all endeavors requires the absence of specific qualities.

1) To succeed in crime requires absence of empathy,

2) To succeed in banking you need absence of shame at hiding risks,

3) To succeed in school requires absence of common sense,

4) To succeed in economics requires absence of understanding of probability, risk, second-order effects, or about anything,

5) To succeed in journalism requires an inability to think about matters that have even an infinitesimally small chance of being relevant next January,

6) But to succeed in life requires a total inability to do anything that makes you uncomfortable when you look at yourself in the mirror.

4 months ago | [YT] | 144

Picking Nuggets

"A healthy feeling of inferiority is not something that comes from comparing oneself to others, but from one’s comparison with one’s ideal self."
- Ichiro Kishimi


"If you feel that you are in competition with anyone, for anything, you are a loser."
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb


"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self."
- Ernest Hemingway

5 months ago | [YT] | 139

Picking Nuggets

Great nugget from The Courage to be Disliked

5 months ago | [YT] | 89

Picking Nuggets

Companies beyond the entrepreneur stage start to rot. - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

5 months ago | [YT] | 65

Picking Nuggets

Great nugget from Schopenhauer

7 months ago | [YT] | 118

Picking Nuggets

Happy Sunday!

7 months ago | [YT] | 43

Picking Nuggets

🟠 My ebook (43 Nuggets to become Better, Richer and Wiser) just crossed 10,000 downloads!

🙏 A huge thanks to everyone who has contributed!

🔖 And if you still haven't grabbed your copy yet, you can download it here (for free) - pickingnuggets.com/

7 months ago (edited) | [YT] | 71

Picking Nuggets

🟠 My latest ebook (43 Nuggets to Become Better, Richer and Wiser) has now been downloaded almost 10,000 times! (with 120+ reviews)

🙏 A huge thanks to everyone who has contributed!

🔖 And if you still haven't grabbed your copy yet, you can download it here - pickingnuggets.com/

8 months ago | [YT] | 72