Nobody reads the disclosures that roll down your computer screen. You click 'I agree' but you don't know what you're agreeing to.
Nassim Nicholas TalebRead
Those who were unlucky in life in spite of their skills would eventually rise. The lucky fool might have benefited from some luck in life; over the longer run he would slowly converge to the state of a less-lucky idiot. Each one would revert to his long-term properties.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Skill and resilience will outlast luck, leading to long-term success.
In this quote, Nassim Nicholas Taleb emphasizes the disparity between luck and skill in determining a person's long-term success. While someone may experience temporary advantages due to luck, it is the consistent efforts and competencies of those who may have initially been unlucky that will ultimately prevail, highlighting the importance of intrinsic qualities over transient fortune.
Themes
LuckSkillSuccessResilienceLong-Term
In practice
Example use cases
Using this quote in a motivational speech to emphasize the importance of hard work over relying on luck.
More from Nassim Nicholas Taleb
All quotes →Fragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility.
Nassim Nicholas TalebRead
Individuals should think about the worst-case scenarios and plan for them. The world will be crazier than you think it will be. Put money away, and then you can live with much more freedom.
Nassim Nicholas TalebRead
A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.
Nassim Nicholas TalebRead
A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.
Nassim Nicholas TalebRead
They think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns)
Nassim Nicholas TalebRead
Similar quotes
There's sadness to anyone that dies before their time, and specifically ones that seem to affect people in a positive way. It doesn't matter if it's Whitney Houston or a nameless, faceless person on the street. That's just as big of a tragedy for me.
Chris CornellRead
I really don't believe in magic.
J. K. RowlingRead
I am also greatly indebted to Bergson, William James, and John Dewey. One of my preoccupations has been to rescue their type of thought from the charge of anti-intellectualism, which rightly or wrongly has been associated with it.
Alfred North WhiteheadRead
While I meditate on the gulf towards which I travelled, and reflect on my youthful disobedience, for these things I weep, mine eye runneth down with water.
John WoolmanRead
The majority never has right on its side. Never, I say! That is one of these social lies against which an independent, intelligent men must wage war. Who is it that constitute the majority of the population in a country? Is it the clever folk, or the stupid? I don't imagine you will dispute the fact that at present the stupid people are in an absolutely overwhelming majority all the world over.
Henrik IbsenRead
To the extent that the judicial profession becomes the daily routine of deciding cases on the most secure precedents and the narrowest grounds available, the judicial mind atrophies and its perspective shrinks.
Irving KaufmanRead