Make it a Serendipitous Year!
A new year, a new president in less than a fortnight and lots of problems we never expected. The financial world as we knew it has undergone a sea change. My interest in AIG, which I wrote about under International Investing, is more than academic. I worked for the company in New York after college, helping with a company magazine that reflected AIG’s worldwide reach. The morning’s mail might contain letters from Singapore, Manila or Sao Paulo. It was an exciting time and if anyone else who worked there happens to see this, I’d love to hear from them.
Partly to make sense of the recent cataclysmic economic events, I picked up a copy of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.
Most of us live with a false sense of security, Taleb maintains. We’re wired that way and the so-called experts, especially economists and statisticians, encourage us to think that things will stay pretty much the same. Then wham, the unexpected happens and catches us off guard. The world economy has just experienced a black swan event. The title refers to the fact that everyone thought swans were invariably white until black swans turned up in Australia. An options trader turned philosopher, Taleb writes with considerable wit and humor. The book is tough going at times but worth the effort, and its outlook isn’t totally grim as these quotes prove.
“We are so quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurrence of monstrous proportions.”
“Imagine a speck of dust next to a planet a billion times the size of the earth. The speck of dust represents the odds in favor of your being born; the huge planet would be the odds against it. So stop sweating the small stuff. Don’t be like the ingrate who got a castle as a present and worried about the mildew in the bathroom. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth – remember you are a Black Swan.”
I especially liked the advice - “maximize the serendipity around you.”