Nassim Taleb on Planning Quotes

"It’s much easier to sell ‘look how much I know’ than ‘look how much I don’t know’."

"The problem with modern life is that we have too much planning and not enough soul."

"The best way to manage risk is to have a margin of safety."

"The collective is more antifragile than the individual, provided the individuals are allowed to fail."

"The goal is to be the one who benefits from the volatility, not the one who is destroyed by it."

"Robustness is the ability to withstand a shock; antifragility is the ability to improve from it."

"If you want to succeed, you must be willing to fail in public."

"The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know."

"Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendation. Just ask them what they have in their portfolio."

"The problem with planning is that it creates a false sense of security."

"Complexity is the enemy of execution."

"The best planners are those who know when to throw the plan away."

"We are demonstrably bad at predicting, and planning is prediction."

"Invest in preparation, not in prediction."

"Optionality is the antidote to planning; it is the property of systems that allow you to benefit from the positive side of uncertainty."

"The strategy for the discoverer is to rely less on planning and more on tinkering."

"Don't listen to the advice of someone who makes a living from giving advice."

"Focus on the consequences rather than the probability."

"The more you plan for the future, the more you are anchored to a past that won't repeat."

"Wisdom is knowing what to ignore."

"The most important thing to plan for is the end of the plan."

"The future is not just a destination; it's a series of shocks."

"We are built to be hunters, not planners."

"We see the past as a single line, but the future as a tree of possibilities. Planning ignores the tree."

"Fragility is the cost of efficiency."

"True learning happens when you have something at stake."

"Avoid the ‘empty suit’ who plans without skin in the game."

"The biggest risk is the one you don't see."

"We don't need to understand the world as much as we need to build systems that are robust to our lack of understanding."

"Procrastination is a message from our natural will."

"I want to be broad-minded and narrow-focused."

"Trial and error is not really trial and error; it is trial with small errors."

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, but it's also the best defense against chaos."