Nassim Taleb on Business Quotes

"To be a professional is to be reliable. To be an entrepreneur is to be antifragile."

"The Lindy effect is the idea that the longer something has lasted, the longer it is likely to last."

"If you want to be successful, focus on avoiding ruin rather than chasing high returns. Survival is the first step to wealth."

"The goal of a business should be to reach a point where it no longer needs to predict the future to be profitable."

"You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits."

"The 'Intellectual Yet Idiot' is the person who thinks they can run a business by reading a spreadsheet without ever visiting the factory floor."

"Robustness is when you don't care about the outcome of an event. Antifragility is when you want the event to happen."

"The modern world replaces the 'know-how' of the practitioner with the 'know-what' of the academic, which is a disaster for business."

"Large corporations are fragile; they are like dinosaurs that cannot adapt to a changing climate. Small, agile businesses are the future."

"I would rather be dumb and have optionality than be extremely smart and have no options."

"The best way to learn how a business works is to start one. Theoretical knowledge is a poor substitute for the scars of experience."

"Optionality is the property of things that benefit from volatility. In business, having options is more valuable than having a plan."

"Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his actions."

"If you take risks and face your fate with dignity, there is nothing you can do that makes you small; if you don't take risks, there is nothing you can do that makes you grand."

"Wealth is not about having more things, but about having the freedom to say 'no' to things that don't matter."

"The difference between a businessman and a careerist is that the businessman takes risks for himself, while the careerist takes risks for the company with other people's money."

"You will never fully understand a business until you have skin in the game, meaning you pay for your own mistakes."

"A business that is not antifragile will eventually be destroyed by the very volatility it tries to avoid."

"Efficiency is the enemy of robustness. A business that is too lean has no buffer for when things go wrong."

"The most important aspect of a business is its ability to survive a 'Black Swan'—an unpredictable event with massive consequences."

"Innovation comes from the bottom up, through trial and error, not from the top down through government or corporate planning."

"You don't want to be 'right', you want to be 'not wrong'."

"Character is the only thing we have that is not for sale."

"The Lindy Effect suggests that for non-perishable things like business ideas, every additional day of survival implies a longer life expectancy."

"We are much better at doing than at understanding. In business, focus on the 'doing' and let the 'understanding' follow."

"Ergodicity means that the average of the group is not the same as the average of the individual over time. In business, stay alive."

"Success is becoming a self-adversary. You are victorious when you are the one who can most effectively critique your own business model."

"True leadership is about taking the blame when things go wrong and giving the credit when things go right."

"In a complex world, the person who says 'I don't know' is more reliable than the expert who provides a precise forecast."

"Avoid the advice of people who make a living from giving advice but do not face the consequences of their recommendations."

"A man is morally free only to the extent that his business and his livelihood are not dependent on the approval of others."

"In business, as in life, the most important things are unmeasurable. Focus on the quality of the process, not just the metrics."

"Intellectuals are often people who are not intelligent."