A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives.

Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don’t know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the “impossible.”

For years, Taleb has studied how we fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we actually do. In this revelatory book, he explains everything we know about what we don’t know. He offers surprisingly simple tricks for dealing with black swans and benefiting from them.

Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications The Black Swan will change the way you look at the world. Taleb is a vastly entertaining writer, with wit, irreverence, and unusual stories to tell. He has a polymathic command of subjects ranging from cognitive science to business to probability theory.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is one of the most important public intellectuals currently writing. He is an essayist, philosopher of randomness, researcher, and practitioner of financial mathematics. As a pioneer of complex financial derivatives. he had a lengthy and successful career as a senior Wall Street trader, before he began his philosophical career as an epistemologist of chance, and focused on the development of his “black swan theory” of unexpected rare events. Taleb’s literary approach is to provide a modern-day brand of philosophical tale by mixing narrative fiction, often semi-autobiographical, with scientific commentary in a style similar to Milan Kundera, Ismail Kadare, and Alain de Botton. Fortune Magazine called his previous book, Fooled by Randomness, one of the “smartest books of all time” – another critic opined “Had Nassim Taleb been born in any other period, he would have certainly been put to death.”

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