summary of the black swan by nassim nicholas taleb

You wouldn’t have been shocked and surprised. Imagine you’d known about the 9/11 attacks, the 2008 financial crisis or hurricane Katrina in advance. But when Dutch explorers finally saw black swans for the first time in Western Australia, the term morphed into describing an event that occurred in spite of seeming impossible.Īs a logical consequence, those who are the least aware of a Black Swan coming, will suffer the most from its often already extreme consequences. The name stems from the fact that up until 1697, mankind believed all swans were white. Nassim Taleb calls an event a “Black Swan” if it’s unpredictable not because it’s random, but because our outlook on what’s possible was too narrow. If you want to save this summary for later, download the free PDF and read it whenever you want.ĭownload PDF Lesson 1: Black Swans dramatically change the reality of those, who aren’t aware that they’re coming.

If you try to gauge real-world risk like you would in a game of cards, you’ll likely make bad decisions.Īre you prepared to find out what you don’t know? We’ll see!.

Never try to explain the future by looking at your past, it’s a bad indicator.

Because Black Swans are always unexpected, they dramatically change the world of those, who are not prepared for them.Here are 3 lessons from The Black Swan to help you get better at expecting what others don’t: They’re too narrow, none of this stuff is actually realistic.” Yet, we use narrow models to predict reality all the time – which is why we’re so bad at it. He always said: “All of those models don’t stand a chance in the real world. One of my friends studied economics in college. This book is about statistics, probability, and how we often falsely use those to estimate the likelihood of real-life events.

The Black Swan is the second volume of his 4-volume body of work on uncertainty, called “Incerto.” Antifragile is the fourth.įirst of all, this has nothing to do with the (in my opinion good) movie Black Swan.

The way he thinks is marvelous and there’s so much to learn from him. The only point of critique I have to make about Nassim Nicholas Taleb is that I wish he’d publish more books faster. Listen to the audio of this summary with a free reading.fm account:

Summary of the black swan by nassim nicholas taleb