I knew what I was getting into here. I had read The Black Swan and it was one of my favorite books. Taleb looks at the world and see it for what it is; whether there’s some power that controls everything or not, we have little control over many events and have incredible difficulty projecting or even guessing the future.
While this fault can provide incredible variety and intrigue to daily life, it can cause havoc in our personal lives and our financial lives if we are not always cognizant of our incredible inability to guess what may come next. My only problem with this book is that Taleb says in 500 pages what probably could have been said in 100. By the time you get to the end of the book, you feel as if you’ve read the same thesis 10 times (yet inexplicably Taleb says that the book continues to grow). While the Black Swan felt like a tight dissertation on our opaque and often pathetic view of the future, fooled by randomness feels like a mess and Taleb’s personal testing ground for his ideas.
Nonetheless, the book is a good read. It helped me to reflect on how much I anticipate that I can figure out how the future will play out and reminded me that you can always use circumstances for your advantage. While we certainly do not want to always plan for the worst, we can act in such a way that things do not have to be perfect for us to profit.
