How to thrive and survive in an unpredictable world
Probably you haven’t realized yet but you have been living in two parallel worlds.
As Nassim Taleb explains in his books, one of them is predictable, average and normal. The probabilities of events happening are easy to compute and their impact is low. This one is called Mediocristan.
We spend most of our time in Mediocristan. A place subjected to the laws of time and gravity.
Take height, for example, the tallest person in the world is 8’9” (271 cm), the shortest 21” (53cm) and the average is 5’5” (165cm)
The range is very limited. The tallest person is less than double the average and the shortest is a third of the average. The vast majority of people are very close to the average with very few near the extremes. It would be impossible to find a person 1000 times taller than another.
In statistics, this is known as Gaussian normal distribution and is often represented by a bell-shaped-curve.
The other world is Extremistan where extreme events are rare and unpredictable but have vast consequences.
Money belongs to this world. The net worth of the average US household is $100.000, compare that to Bill Gates’ at $100 Billion. He is 1 million times richer than the…
