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
And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.
Joyce Carol OatesRead
Death obsesses me, yes it does. I can't really understand why it doesn't obsess everyone - I think it does really, I'm just a little more out about it.
J. K. RowlingRead
There's so many people going through so many, like, uncomfortable situations. For me to be - I mean, obviously being nervous is natural - but for me to think that winning a tennis match or losing a tennis match is the end of the world, I think just kind of shows what kind of privilege I have.
Coco GauffRead
I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.
Iris MurdochRead
American writers often say they find it difficult to write Superman. They say he's too powerful; you can't give him problems. But Superman is a metaphor. For me, Superman has the same problems we do, but on a Paul Bunyan scale. If Superman walks the dog, he walks it around the asteroid belt because it can fly in space. When Superman's relatives visit, they come from the 31st century and bring some hellish monster conqueror from the future. But it's still a story about your relatives visiting.
Grant MorrisonRead
The miser, starving his brother's body, starves also his own soul, and at death shall creep out of his great estate of injustice, poor and naked and miserable
Theodore ParkerRead