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If you want to write a book, don’t ask, “How much money does the average book make?” In this context, “average” is meaningless. You’re in the world of Black Swans. The Black Swan is a book by Nicholas Nassim Taleb, and I have found the ideas in it critical to navigating my career as an author. Here – in my own words – is my summary of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. These are the ideas I think about when I’m considering writing a new book.   Where does the term “Black Swan” come from? Imagine a world where you’ve only ever seen white swans. If someone asked you whether or not black swans existed, you might say no. You’ve seen thousands of swans, and they’ve all been white. Therefore, black swans don’t exist. You’ve mistaken an absence of evidence for evidence of absence. Just because you haven’t seen evidence of black swans, does not prove they don’t exist. What is a Black Swan? A positive Black Swan: In 2010, I wrote a blog post. That blog post prompted a publisher to reach out to me. I got a book deal. A negative Black Swan: A Las Vegas casino had an insurance policy. They protected against every cheating scenario they could imagine. They had the most popular show in Vegas, where magicians worked with giant live tigers. So they protected against the scenario of a tiger jumping into the audience. But they never imagined the tiger would maim one of the performers – Roy of Siegfried and Roy. Siegfried and Roy lost their careers. The casino lost $100 million. Both of these incidents are Black Swans: Black Swans are outliers: They’re not what we expect. Nothing in the past predicts a Black Swan. Black Swans have extreme impact: The impact could be positive, such as my book deal, or negative, such as the tiger attack, or the terrorist attacks of 9/11. We backwards-rationalize Black Swans: After a Black Swan happens, it seems obvious. We look back and come up with explanations for how it happened. This gives us the illusion that Black Swans are explainable and predictable. Note: COVID-19 is not a Black Swan. As Taleb has explained, global pandemics happen regularly. They’re uncommon, but they’re inevitable, and we know that. The Black Swan Turkey Imagine you’re a Turkey. Every day, humans come and feed you. You think humans are pretty good and nice. Each day you get new information to confirm this belief. A graph of your opinion of humans might look like this:     Notice the sharp drop-off at the end. That’s the day before Thanksgiving. Things seemed good, until they weren’t. History does not always predict the future. Events come along that shatter all assumptions we’ve made based upon past information. Mediocristan vs. Extremistan Black Swans happen in a place Taleb calls “Extremistan.” Extremistan is the opposite of “Mediocristan.” There’s a joke I like, “Bill Gates walks into a bar. On average, everyone there is a millionaire.” We’re attracted to the “average” and the predictable. But oftentimes the concept of “average” is misleading. Some things happen in Mediocristan and are predictable. The “average” is meaningful in Mediocristan. Other things happen in Extremistan and are unpredictable and extreme. The “average” is meaningless in Extremistan. Mediocristan is about “the collective, the routine, the obvious, and the predicted.” Mediocristan is about risk spread out amongst many, to avoid surprises. An hourly-wage job at Starbucks is possible only in Mediocristan. Extremistan is about “the singular, the accidental, the unseen and the unpredicted.” It’s where the Black Swans happen: random events you never expected, caused by forces you’ll never understand. Such as I experienced suddenly getting a book deal or working with a company that sold to Google. Mediocristan is about variables that fall within a predictable range. In the history of humanity, there’s never been a man 100 feet tall, or a woman 2,000 years old. Nobody has even come close to these extremes. Height and life expectancy follow a bell curve.   A bell curve. (Source: D Wells, Wikimedia Commons)   Distribution of height. (Source: Our World in Data)[/caption]     Extremistan is about variables that scale indefinitely. There’s no known limit to how rich a person can be. The “average” net worth of a U.S. family is about $700,000. But to be richer than half of all Americans you need only $100,000. Still, Jeff Bezos has more than $100,000,000,000.   Wealth distribution, by percentile, in the U.S. Jeff Bezos is 10x as wealthy as the highest point in this chart. (Wikipedia)[/caption] Why are Black Swans important? Understanding Black Swans can prepare you for the unexpected. If you learn about the impact that unexpected and extreme events can have, you can avoid foolish choices that expose you to negative Black Swans. Exposing yourself to Black Swans can make you successful. As we’ll talk about later, when you behave as if you’re in Mediocristan, you miss out on the positive Black Swans you’d find Extremistan. Businesses that thrive on Black Swans include venture capital, scientific research, and publishing. (Note: Another reason Black Swans are important is – as I talked about in Mind Management, Not Time Management – if it’s predictable, it can be automated. Your edge as a human is not in Mediocristan where the robots are taking over. It’s in Extremistan – in doing something nobody could expect.) Black Swan barrier: Platonicity One way we blind ourselves from Black Swans is through what Taleb calls “Platonicity.” Named after the philosopher, Plato, “Platonicity” is our desire to define things, and to pay more attention to things that have been defined. We create names for objects, we create terms (yes, such as “Platonicity”), and we invent nationalities. Because we’re so focused on things we define, we miss all the messier stuff that also matters. Taleb describes it as “[mistaking] the map for the territory.” (I once wrote about a similar concept, and called it Stuff and Things.) It’s helpful to categorize things, but it becomes a problem when we see a category as definitive, and don’t see the fuzzy boundaries between categories or revise them when we see new information that doesn’t fit how we categorize things. We’ve seen this in the gendered bathroom debate. We broke gender down into two categories. Based on that we made two bathrooms. But we’re realizing it’s not so simple. To be Platonic is to be top-down, formulaic, and close-minded. To be a-Platonic is to be bottom-up, open-minded, skeptical, and empirical. The Platonification of breast milk Doctors in the 1960s replicated breast milk in a laboratory, by replicating the components they could see in the milk (the things they had “Platonified”). It seemed to make no practical sense for women to go through the inconvenience of breast feeding when you could just use bottles and lab-made formula. There was an absence of evidence of what the benefits of breast milk were, and that was taken as evidence of absence of benefits. We didn’t know the full benefits of breast milk, but we assumed the components we could see were the only important parts. It turned out children who were not breast fed were later at an increased risk of some cancers. If the mothers themselves had breast fed, they would have had a reduced risk of breast cancer. Black Swan barrier: The Triplet of Opacity Another way we blind ourselves from Black Swans is through what Taleb calls “The Triplet of Opacity.” Those are: The Illusion of understanding. We think we understand what’s going on, but the world is more complicated and random than we know. The retrospective distortion. We assess things after the fact, so we backwards rationalize and come up with reasons why things happened. The overvaluation of information. We place too much emphasis on facts – the things we can “Platonify” – which blinds us from stuff that isn’t so easy to Platonify. How to make Black Swans happen? Since Platonification blinds us to Black Swans, and we suffer from the illusion of understanding and the retrospective distortion, it may seem silly to try to make Black Swans happen. You can’t engineer a Black Swan, but you can create the conditions for positive Black Swans to happen, as I talked about on episode 146. Tinker Top-down planning gives us the illusion of control, and keeps us in Mediocristan. Instead, tinker as much as possible, and learn to recognize opportunities when they present themselves. Taleb says the reason free markets work is not because they give rewards or drive incentives. Rather, free markets work because they let people get lucky through trial and error. (Then we explain away the brilliant things we did to arrive at this wonderful discovery.) Many discoveries come from searching for what you know, and finding what you didn’t expect. Europeans first learned of the American continent while searching for a route to India. I got my first book deal when I was trying to get votes for my speech proposal for a conference. Be patient Negative Black Swans happen suddenly, but positive Black Swans happen slowly. “It is much easier and much faster to destroy than to build.” Black Swan discoveries take time to have an impact. The computer, the internet, and the laser all had a huge impacts, but were underappreciated after initial discovery. Charles H. Townes was teased by his colleagues for inventing the laser, because they thought it was useless. It turned out to be important to eyesight correction, surgery, and data storage and retrieval. Denarrate The triplet of opacity feeds into the “narrative fallacy.” We’re wired to come up with stories of why things happen, but Black Swans happen for unknown reasons. Taleb realized that as a stock trader, there was no way for him to get an informational edge. He realized any piece of news that came out would quickly be worked into the market price of any security. So, he stopped reading the news. He recognized that reading the news as a stock trader would just support the narrative fallacy. Taleb describes a study where sports bookmakers were given ten variables to predict horse races. When they were later given double the information, these bookmakers were no more accurate in their predictions – yet they were much more confident. So Taleb decided that by reading the news he wouldn’t get an edge and he would become overconfident. The Barbell Strategy The main method Taleb recommends for protecting against negative Black Swans while exposing oneself to positive Black Swans is what he calls the Barbell Strategy.   Think of a barbell, with weights on either side. On one side of the barbell is your sure bets – things where you have little chance of losing. On the other side of the barbell is your wildcards – things with unlimited upside. The Barbell Strategy in investing (Note: I’m not a finance expert and nothing I’m about to say is investment advice.) In investing, the sure bets would be treasury bills, cash, and gold. Obviously Black Swans could come along and make these bets not so sure bets, but they’re as sure as you can get. The wildcards would be highly-leveraged option trading, angel investments, or cryptocurrency. You have a decent chance of losing your money, but there’s almost no limit to how much you can gain. In an investing context, Taleb recommends putting 85–90% of your assets into the safe investments, and the remaining 10–15% in the speculative investments. What you’re avoiding is the stuff in the middle. People think index funds are safe because they historically gain about 7% a year, but the entire stock market has lost up to 30% of its value very quickly. Since we’re living in an increasingly complex world, there’s no telling what kind of Black Swan could come in the future and cause an even bigger drop. The Barbell Strategy in creative work I hadn’t realized before reading The Black Swan that I had used the Barbell Strategy to build my creative career. When I was first starting out, I made sure to get just enough freelance work to pay my bills. I also spent a portion of my time building passive income streams. The rest of the time, I spent tinkering and exploring my own ideas. After three years, I randomly landed a book deal to write Design for Hackers. Dan Ariely mentioned a Barbell Strategy in my latest podcast conversation with him. He says he “gambles with his time.” He spends some portion of his time on things that don’t make sense, such as collaborating with a mentalist on-stage in one of his speeches, or working with a cartoonist. My own Barbell Strategy has benefitted from Dan’s Barbell Strategy. A blog post I wrote as a “wildcard” – during one of my Weeks of Want – prompted Dan to reach out to me. I collaborated with him on a productivity app. We sold it to Google. That blog post also led to my third book, Mind Management, Not Time Management. There’s your The Black Swan summary! I hope you’ve found this The Black Swan summary useful and clear. Taleb’s writing can be confusing and even off-putting at first, but if you take the time to understand his ideas, they can help you navigate an uncertain world and find breakthrough opportunities. I highly recommend The Black Swan. It’s one of my favorite books.   Mind Management, Not Time Management now available! After nearly a decade of work, Mind Management, Not Time Management is now available! This book will show you how to manage your mental energy to be productive when creativity matters. Buy it now! My Weekly Newsletter: Love Mondays Start off each week with a dose of inspiration to help you make it as a creative. Sign up at: kadavy.net/mondays. Listener Showcase Abby Stoddard makes the Dunnit app – the "have-done lilst." It’s a minimalist tool designed to motivate action and build healthy habits. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »     Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/black-swan-summary 

Establishing eruvin for smaller cities and towns - a story of one town (Kankunya) that seeks expertise in calling in someone who knows eruvin. And even so, the expert (Abaye in this case) needs to make sure that the eruv will hold up to the scrutiny of naysayers. I deed, he keeps second-guessing himself. For example, do the homes abutting the river need windows, or really not? Is Mehoza, another city that shifted status from a more public to a more private city, a good parallel, or not really? The process of creating the actual eruv is indeed a challenge! Plus: Abaye then probes whether a given position finds its source in logic or in some tradition -- he is looking for there to be logic. We're seeing the Amoraim work through the cases to the practicality of psak halakhah. Also: A new Mishnah brings us back to techum Shabbat, and determining where the eruv techumin can be set up. Where does the eruv actually need to be placed? Note - Another push for logic.

In this episode of the Happy Warrior Podcast, we go over the failure of the woke project for Disney Star Wars and the kerfuffle over Pete's latest piece on the subject at the Post Millennial. https://thepostmillennial.com/the-last-thing-star-wars-needs-is-another-social-justice-director/ Note Another episode will follow up tomorrow about what is happening at Youtube and censorship! Our Social Media: Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnsSjx-ECzH-ijyVKwb-ZpA/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/happywarrior... Twitter: https://twitter.com/HappyWarriorP Itunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... This Podcast is 100% Commercial-Free! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/happywarrior/message

Subject: Supernatural - Home (1x09) Observers: John Pavlich, Wendy Hembrock Record Date: January 25, 2012, 09:18 PM Plot Summary: The Winchester Brothers must return to their childhood home and confront their haunted past, when a poltergeist threatens the new residents. Note: Another member of Tuning Into Sci-Fi TV visits the podcast. This time, it's Supernatural fangirl, Wendy and she's back to discuss episode nine from the first season, "Home". We talk about childhood fears, juice addictions and this well-worn trope from film and television. Remember to listen for the preemptive countdown before starting the episode on your DVD.

Subject: Bring It On (2000) Observers: John Pavlich, Josh Bradley, Mike Schindler Record Date: November 13, 2011, 01:54 AM Plot Summary: An ambitious, high school Cheerleader (Kirsten Dunst) becomes the new captain of her squad, but is shocked to discover the previous captain has been stealing their award-winning moves and routines from an under-privileged, rival school. Note: Another fun, commentary crossover, co-hosts from Soulless Minions and Commentary Track Stars join me for one of the more surprising comedies from 2000. We discuss the ensemble cast, relive our past, high school experiences, the importance of romantic chemistry and try to understand why this gem has yet to be released on Blu-ray. Remember to listen for the preemptive countdown before starting the movie on your DVD.

The Podcast has been nominated by Family Tree Magazine's Top 40 Genealogy Blogs in the HOW-TO Category. Please cast your vote for us at http://www.familytreemagazine.com/article/40BestVoting. This week's news includes: Ancestry.com will present a free online presentation on Wednesday, October 14, 2009, at 8:00 PM Eastern Time titled "Learn the Best Strategies for Searching Ancestry.com" - and you can register at http://learn.ancestry.com/LearnMore/Webinars.aspx; Ancestry.com also announced that they have expanded their agreement with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to scan and index documents there, and have therefore opened a new scanning facility in the Washington, DC, area - new content collections from this new facility are discussed in this episode; UK Minister Ed Miliband, visiting Moscow on official business and appearing on a call-in radio program, received a call from a relative. You can read the BBC news story at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8295394.stm. The City of Kennesaw, Georgia, received a grant that enabled them to begin underground imaging of their cemetery, and you can read all about it at http://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/etd/2/.Note: Another update on the Library of Michigan crisis will be provided next week.Maureen A. Taylor, well known as The Photo Detective, has just published a new book, Fashionable Folks: Hairstyles 1840-1900. It can help you date those mystery photos you have. The book is available at http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/fashionable-folks-hair/7559085.The Guys have a busy speaking schedule coming up! Drew will speak about DNA on Sunday, October 11th, for the Jewish Genealogical Society of Tampa Bay (http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~fljgstb). George will be presenting at an all-day conference for the Louisville Genealogical Society (details at http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~kylgs/seminar2.html) in Louisville, KY, on Saturday, October 17th. And George AND Drew will be speaking for the Western Michigan Genealogical Society (http://www.wmgs.org) in Grand Rapids, MI, on Friday and Saturday, November 6th and 7th. The society is celebrating its 55th anniversary with a banquet on Friday evening, and an all-day seminar on Saturday, titled Got Ancestors?! Guydes to Genealogical Research. Details are available at http://gotancestors.com. The day's festivities will conclude with The Genealogy Guys LIVE!, a live recording session of the podcast with questions and answers.Drew interviews Dick Eastman, author of Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter (http://blog.eogn.com). Dick will be appearing for the Pinellas Genealogy Society in Largo, Florida, Saturday, February 13, 2010. The listener email includes: Carolyn raves about how much she likes RootsMagic software; Lee continues discussing wives' maiden names on gravestones; Roger tells us that the Scottish practice of using maiden names of married women in birth entries in parish registers and on gravestones. Roger shares two examples:http://roger.lisaandroger.com/showmedia.php?mediaID=81 shows a parish register; examples of headstones appear at http://roger.lisaandroger.com/browsemedia.php?mediatypeID=headstones. Pat shares concerns about official, raised seal birth certificates from New York that are using different birth locations now rather than the actual (and original) locations. TC shares information about Dropbox software, a free tool to help keep data on multiple computers in synch. It is available at http://www.getdropbox.com and is free.George talks about Internet Genealogy magazine from Moorshead Publications, the last magazine covering Internet research topics. (Visit http://www.internet-genealogy.com for more information and to subscribe.) Katie asks for guidance for using pre-1850 U.S. federal censuses and getting past some roadblocks created because only the head of household was listed, followed with tick marks representing gender, age, and race.