A Quote by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
If I ask you to write down the last 4 digits of your social security number, and then take you out to lunch and ask you how many dentists there are in Manhattan, there's going to be a high correlation between those two numbers. What happens is that the number psychologically makes you feel confident.
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They know your name, address, telephone number, credit card numbers, who ELSE is driving the car "for insurance", ... your driver's license number. In the state of Massachusetts, this is the same number as that used for Social Security, unless you object to such use. In THAT case, you are ASSIGNED a number and you reside forever more on the list of "weird people who don't give out their Social Security Number in Massachusetts."
You go ask any founder of any company why he or she did it, you will never hear, "I wanted to create jobs for the community" as the number one, number two, number three, number four, number five, number 10 reason for doing so. That is a result of the success the business enjoys. Creating jobs is not why people start businesses. Creating jobs is not how people innovate in business. It's not how they compete.
Glamour is what makes a man ask for your telephone number. But it also is what makes a woman ask for the name of your dressmaker.
You don't have to worry about being a number one, number two, or number three. Numbers don't have anything to do with placement. Numbers only have something to do with repetition.
When you lose your Visa card, you get a new card with a new number, and any new charges with the old number are blocked. Why can't we do the same with Social Security numbers?
Nonmathematical people sometimes ask me, “You know math, huh? Tell me something I’ve always wondered, What is infinity divided by infinity?” I can only reply, “The words you just uttered do not make sense. That was not a mathematical sentence. You spoke of ‘infinity’ as if it were a number. It’s not. You may as well ask, 'What is truth divided by beauty?’ I have no clue. I only know how to divide numbers. ‘Infinity,’ ‘truth,’ ‘beauty’—those are not numbers.
The truth is everybody does it from time to time. People dial telephone numbers and they get a wrong number only to find that they've read the last two digits backwards. Everybody does it, but dyslexics have this tendency to a higher degree.
Being prepared helps you feel more confident at the doctor's office. Think about what you want to ask and write those questions down.
Often when I'm on TV, they'll ask what are the three most important things for people to do. I know they want me to say that people should change their light bulbs. I say the number one thing is to organize politically; number two, do some political organizing; number three, get together with your neighbors and organize; and then if you have energy left over from all of that, change the light bulb.
In terms of getting people to experiment more and take more risk, there are at least three things that immediately come to my mind. Number one, of course, is role-modeling it yourself. Number two is when people take intelligent, smart risks and yet it doesn't work out, not shooting them. And number three, being honest with yourself. If the culture you have is radically different from an experiment and take-risk culture, then you have a big change you going to have to make—and no little gimmicks are going to do it for you.
Write down the most important things you have to do tomorrow. Now, number them in the order of their true importance. The first thing tomorrow morning, start working on an item Number 1, and stay with it until completed. Then take item Number 2 the same way. Then Number 3, and so on. Don't worry if you don't complete everything on the schedule. At least you will have completed the most important projects before getting to the less important ones.
I ask people what they do in sales, how much money they made last year, what their cost of sales is, and they don't even know. If you don't know your numbers, you're going out of business. I don't care how good your product is.
Let me tell you girls the three most important things I learned about life: Number one: Hold fast to your friends; number two: There's no such thing as security; and number three: Don't go see 'Ishtar.'
In our counterterrorism cases and our counterintelligence cases, we can issue all kinds of - of layers of approval in the FBI, a national security letter to find out the subscriber to a particular telephone number and to find out what numbers that telephone number was in contact with. Not the content of those communications, but just the connection.
There is a correlation between economic inequality and personal violence. The explanation for the correlation isn't completely clear; there are a number of possibilities.
If you just do something, then you're a five-year wonder and, goodbye, you're gone. But if people feel it's worthwhile, not only do they copy but they want to learn how to do it To me, that's what it's all about. If someone were to ask me, 'What's the number one thing, in essence, that you left behind?' It was the teaching of others so that they could take my work and take it further.
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