Fooled By Randomness

Randomness, chance, and luck influence our lives and our work more than we realize. Because of hindsight bias and survivorship bias, in particular, we tend to forget the many who fail, remember the few who succeed, and then create reasons and patterns for their success even though it was largely random. Mild success can be explainable by skills and hard work, but wild success is usually attributable to variance and luck.” - Fooled By Randomness, Nassim Taleb [1]

People that are successful love to share their stories about how they got to where they are. The stories are especially interesting when they come from nothing. There’s lots of content out there that dissects the patterns of these extremely sucessful people. But as Taleb says in his book, Fooled By Randomness, wild success is usually attributable to variance and luck.”

Notes

[1] The first quote is James Clear’s three sentence summary on Fooled By Randomness.

June 15, 2020


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