I Got to Know of Nassim Taleb on the Week I was Robbed
I don’t know if I would have started seriously reading non-fiction if I hadn’t read his works.
It was 2 something am.
I was on campus
The night was calm. It was a school night, but my classes would start later in the course of the day. I could afford to stay awake until late.
I was headed back to my room from Chiromo.
Just as I was about to make the corner and swerve to head uphill to my room, I met a crowd of 7 men. From a distance, you could tell they were very ‘spirited’.
Being inebriated was not an uncommon thing among campus students. Even more, I have never felt insecure inside campus grounds.
As I was passing them, their ringleader didn’t budge from his walking lane. There and then, he insisted I give him my stash and all the devices I had on me.
That night, that group took my newly gifted headphones and my phone. Yes, they were gifted and they came to take my gifts. My phone from my brother and the earphones from a close friend for my birthday.
It didn’t hit me until I got to my room.
I just got robbed.
What was supposed to be the safest place was the only place I have ever been robbed.
Funny thing was I met the ring leader the following morning and roughed him a little bit, but that’s a story for another day.
My phone and headphones were a thing of the past now, only memories. But I had my laptop. Luckily, I had left it in my room.
It had all my books and a reserve for almost all my songs.
If anyone is to scrape my library of songs and books, they might just as well as have killed me. At least these were intact.
Inside this library was an author whose works I wanted to read but had been postponing for the longest time. I had to be robbed for it to happen.
The book?
The robbery was an antifragile event — kind of
I am glad I started with this book.
In a way, it explained how I got robbed but ended up benefitting from the situation.
Antifragile was so prominent a concept, it has been accepted in common business jargon. Antifragile systems thrive or benefit from hostile or adverse conditions.
Fragile ones break in the face of adversity.
Robust systems remain fairly unchanged in hostile situations.
I cannot remember the make of the phone. I remember the headphones since it was the first time I had ever received such a gift.
However, the one thing I remember is the message I got from the book. You are better off robust than fragile. Even better, positioning yourself to be antifragile is the preferred option, as the future is opaque and unpredictable in so many ways.
I now had minimal distractions and intense concentration.
It was the beginning of a deep-founded love for non-fiction. It was nothing like the books I used to read in primary school.
It was not like Gifted Hands.
My mother insisted I read all the books by Ben Carson. I did. I loved reading.
But it was not nearly as exciting as Hardy Boys, Secret Seven of the Famous Five. In particular, after reading Arthur Conan Doyle’s work on Sherlock, autobiographies took a back seat.
These were the kind of books I’d read. Rather, these were the kind of books I’d be forced to read.
Until Taleb.
The preacher of skin in the game
Antifragile is a masterpiece.
There’s something about great ideas. Once you understand it, you tend to see it in many other places. I could see it in sports, in business, and even in medical school.
I didn’t want the book to end. But he encouraged me to read his other works. He told me to read The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness.
I loved them!
It was a top recommendation whenever anyone asked for a book to read.
I remember telling two people to read it. The first was my friend who had gifted me the headphones. It was not because I wanted her to understand why I no longer had her earphones.
I had explained it to her. She’s understanding like that.
The books were recommendations because the ideas were so powerful. My friend, who takes her sweet time with books, knew upfront that she might not finish it. My sister, who can read books, delayed up until someone else recommended it to her yet again.
But I have now flipped the concept.
I don’t want to recommend just books. I want to recommend authors. Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a stellar author.
As a former trader, he understood risk from a practical point of view.
As a scholar, he understood its shortcomings.
One gets to have a strong opinion about risk after experiencing its two sides. He developed a thick skin when practicing in these fields.
It was how he developed skin in the game.
From it, he birthed the idea of the black swan.
The Black Swan idea
If you have never heard of the black swan, I don’t know what to say to you.
Well, I do. It’s that you need to know about it.
If all the swans you have ever seen are white, then you can make the statement:
All swans are white
But if you spot only one black swan, it negates the entire statement.
Black swans exist. They are not given as much airplay in Disney movies as they should. Maybe.
But Taleb does. He has built an entire philosophy around it.
The idea was surprises cannot be modeled. They can be good or bad.
Winning the lottery can be a good thing. Losing your property to a landslide can be the opposite.
What the black swan idea does is it embodies the spirit of the scientific method while opening readers to the fallacies of economics.
For instance, we tend to model risk using a mathematical tool that underestimates the potential of risks unfolding in reality.
The Bell Curve, after several deviations, does not give a realistic picture of how tragedies can unfold.
The recessions were hardly predicted. But once they happen, safety measures are modeled around it. While the lesson is surprises can hardly be modeled, these lessons do not safeguard economies from other recessions.
After reading more about systems thinking, I figured out why this outcome happens.
I also had a black swan incident
I got robbed on campus, at a place that should be one of the safest. The result is I got to understand an idea that I will never forget.
What that a good thing or a bad thing?
I’d still invoke Taleb by insisting that some things just happen. We don’t need to add a causal or meaningful reason behind it.
But one thing is certain, bumping into Taleb’s works was a black swan moment for me.
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