I read Taleb's The Black Swan this summer. Right after realizing that I wasn't going to college (again). Right after realizing that most of what we're taught to predict is unpredictable anyway. (Click the title to read more).

My Notes

The book argues that rare, unpredictable outlier events shape our world far more than we admit. But humans consistently retrospectively create simplistic explanations and their little patterns for these events to make them appear more predictable than they actually were. Google's success was a Black Swan. So was 9/11. We're taught to learn specifics when we should focus on generalities. We concentrate on what we already know and fail to consider what we don't. And, it perfectly makes sense. Any pattern, statistic, a prediction is all based on what we know. But there are way more things that we simply don't know.

Taleb doesn't advocate for predicting Black Swans. It would be bullshit if he did. He just says we should build robustness to negative events and leverage positive ones.

I stopped trying to plan five years ahead (always knew it was useless. I'd end up scraping them after two months anyway). I also stopped pretending I could predict which skills would matter or which industry would boom. Instead, I expose myself to positive Black Swans. Learn to code. Read widely. Build things. Write more. Things that would open up new gates, a new set of decisions, and a new set of paths for me.

Sometimes I think we're all just pretending we know more than we do.