First Cuppa is having his holiday with his parents for 2 weeks and will be back in late June. I have deferred this holiday for years and until early this year, I made up my mind and gave a go to the plan, ignoring all other issues on hand. It seems a Just Do It approach is mostly correct, and I will take this break to ponder upon if I should Just-Do-It on other areas of my life as well.
I know you gonna miss Cuppa, so I will leave you with a top ten list by Nassim Taleb for your reading pleasure. Although I don't agree on all the list items, I do think they are interesting and serve as good stuff to think about.
Taleb is pretty well-known in the quantitative finance analysis and derivative trading circles. From my limited knowledge, he has been an avid advocate of the concept that randomness cannot be predicted, neither randomness can be modeled and thus managed. His theory has obviously irked people who do risk management and risk modeling for a living. If Taleb was right, then those people will lose their jobs and go wash dishes or toilets.
Taleb attains celebrity status after his book "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" was introduced just slightly earlier than the string of events which more or less match what he describes in the book.
Events like sub-prime crisis, delinquent trader, sky-rocketing fuel prices, natural disasters in various countries had literally shook the whole world. They all share similar traits of being highly-improbable, highly unpredictable, but darn high impact. Some people may say since fossil fuel is non-renewable, and therefore its price hike should be of no surprise. Well I do agree in principle this argument, but look at the world now, how many companies, or even countries are well-prepared??
Some info about him is here.
Taleb's top life tips
1 Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.
2 Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.
3 It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.
4 Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.
5 Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.
6 Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.
7 Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).
8 Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.
9 Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.
10 Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.
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