Gaurav Mathur > Gaurav's Quotes

“By the time a student gets to college, he's spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse resume to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he's ready--for nothing in particular.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Most of a tech company’s value will come at least 10 to 15 years in the future.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“CREATIVE MONOPOLY means new products that benefit everybody and sustainable profits for the creator. Competition means no profits for anybody, no meaningful differentiation, and a struggle for survival.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“When history is written as it ought to be written, it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity.”
― C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“Ignorance killed the cat; curiosity was framed!”
― C. J. Cherryh

“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
― Leon Trotsky

“The minute I was bored with a book or a subject I moved to another one, instead of giving up on reading altogether - when you are limited to the school material and you get bored, you have a tendency to give up and do nothing or play hooky out of discouragement.

The trick is to be bored with a specific book, rather than with the act of reading. So the number of the pages absorbed could grow faster than otherwise. And you find gold, so to speak, effortlessly, just as in rational but undirected trial-and-error-based research. It is exactly like options, trial and error, not getting stuck, bifurcating when necessary but keeping a sense of broad freedom and opportunism.

Trial and error is freedom.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Some can be more intelligent than others in a structured environment—in fact school has a selection bias as it favors those quicker in such an environment, and like anything competitive, at the expense of performance outside it. Although I was not yet familiar with gyms, my idea of knowledge was as follows. People who build their strength using these modern expensive gym machines can lift extremely large weights, show great numbers and develop impressive-looking muscles, but fail to lift a stone; they get completely hammered in a street fight by someone trained in more disorderly settings. Their strength is extremely domain-specific and their domain doesn't exist outside of ludic—extremely organized—constructs. In fact their strength, as with over-specialized athletes, is the result of a deformity. I thought it was the same with people who were selected for trying to get high grades in a small number of subjects rather than follow their curiosity: try taking them slightly away from what they studied and watch their decomposition, loss of confidence, and denial. (Just like corporate executives are selected for their ability to put up with the boredom of meetings, many of these people were selected for their ability to concentrate on boring material.) I've debated many economists who claim to specialize in risk and probability: when one takes them slightly outside their narrow focus, but within the discipline of probability, they fall apart, with the disconsolate face of a gym rat in front of a gangster hit man.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“If you have more than one reason to do something (choose a doctor or veterinarian, hire a gardener or an employee, marry a person, go on a trip), just don’t do it. It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something. Obvious decisions (robust to error) require no more than a single reason.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“Suckers try to win arguments, nonsuckers try to win.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“More data—such as paying attention to the eye colors of the people around when crossing the street—can make you miss the big truck.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“Since procrastination is a message from our natural willpower via low motivation, the cure is changing the environment, or one’s profession, by selecting one in which one does not have to fight one’s impulses. Few can grasp the logical consequence that, instead, one should lead a life in which procrastination is good, as a naturalistic-risk-based form of decision making.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“Books to me are not expanded journal articles, but reading experiences, and the academics who tend to read in order to cite in their writing--rather than read for enjoyment, curiosity, or simply because they like to read--tend to be frustrated when they can't rapidly scan the text and summarize it in one sentence that connects it to some existing discourse in which they have been involved.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“Authors, artists, and even philosophers are much better off having a very small number of fanatics behind them than a large number of people who appreciate their work. The number of persons who dislike the work don’t count—there is no such thing as the opposite of buying your book,”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“much of what other people know isn’t worth knowing.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“But they never notice the following inconsistency: this so-called worst-case event, when it happened, exceeded the worst case at the time.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“Primitive societies are largely free of cardiovascular disease, cancer, dental cavities, economic theories, lounge music, and other modern ailments.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“I feel anger and frustration when I think that one in ten Americans beyond the age of high school is on some kind of antidepressant, such as Prozac. Indeed, when you go through mood swings, you now have to justify why you are not on some medication. There may be a few good reasons to be on medication, in severely pathological cases, but my mood, my sadness, my bouts of anxiety, are a second source of intelligence--perhaps even the first source. I get mellow and lose physical energy when it rains, become more meditative, and tend to write more and more slowly then, with the raindrops hitting the window, what Verlaine called autumnal "sobs" (sanglots). Some days I enter poetic melancholic states, what the Portuguese call saudade or the Turks huzun (from the Arabic word for sadness). Other days I am more aggressive, have more energy--and will write less, walk more, do other things, argue with researchers, answer emails, draw graphs on blackboards. Should I be turned into a vegetable or a happy imbecile?”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“Convincing - and confident - disciplines, say, physics, tend to use little statistical backup, while political science and economics, which have never produced anything of note, are full of elaborate statistics and statistical “evidence” (and you know that once you remove the smoke, the evidence is not evidence).”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti

“Lacing up and leaving the house is the hardest moment of any run. You never regret it once you are en route.”
― Alexandra Heminsley, Running Like a Girl

“The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.”
― J. Krishnamurti

“A poet is not somebody who has great thoughts. That is the menial duty of the philosopher. A poet is somebody who expresses his thoughts, however commonplace they may be, exquisitely. That is the one and only difference between the poet and everybody else.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase