This post sat in the edit queue for weeks...so I'm just going to publish it even though I'm not sure I'm done with it. Time to move on...

Coincidental events can sometimes make a big impact in your thinking. A few weeks ago I read Penelope Trunk's post Living up to your potential is BS, and it annoyed the heck out of me...probably because I don't feel I am living up to my potential. But I don't accept her advice to basically put away your illusions of greatness and settle for living life as a nice person. As always, there was some truth in there--but not my truth. I wanted to write about it, but everything I wrote failed my own filter of self-analysis--I did not want to prove myself to be the delusional narcissist I might well be.

Then I picked up a copy of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb that had been sitting on my shelf for months.

The Black Swan is an enjoyable, iconoclastic rant against conventional wisdom--a bold assertion that the events we consider highly improbable--outliers--are in fact increasingly "the norm" and, more importantly, of greater consequence than we allow for. The book gave me a new way to see the world that fits a lot of the themes I've talked about here for the past year or so and explains so much about my own frustrations.

Follow up:

Taleb says there are two worlds: Mediocristan and Extremistan. The world of Mediocristan fits what we think of as the "bell curve" or normal distribution of randomness. No single event has great significance; everything balances out. Things are random, but they follow a predictable type of randomness. Most efforts at planning presume a world of mediocristan-style uncertainly. In general, if you work hard and do the right things, you will succeed, but of course some people have bad luck. But in general, following the right principles will result in good outcomes.

The world of Extremistan is a world where individual events are highly impactful. Unexpected events--things people did not think were possible (e.g. the black swan) are not simply outliers, they change everything.

There are some great examples of the consequences of imposing our preference for believing life follows the "normal" type of randomness. We routinely generalize from our past experience to predict the future and assume a manageable margin of error. Consider the turkey who is fed all his life by his loving benefactor, the farmer...each day confirms his belief in his role as a sort of pet. But a few days before Thanksgiving, the turkey finds out he was mistaken. The scope of his misunderstanding is beyond what most would consider a tolerable margin of error. But how was he to know?

Taleb's contention is that most social matters belong to the world of Extremistan. As we look back on our history, we find ways to rationalize the past and impose meaning on things, but our predictions of the future are so often spectacularly wrong. He is not saying that everything is hopelessly random and we should just give up on planning for the future, but that we should recognize what game we are playing to understand if our strategy is sound. So, for example, to get through school, prepare for a test, prepare for an athletic event, etc., there are predictable consequences to our actions--we can control our risks to some extent. While running the marathon, it is not likely you will suddenly develop the ability to run 3 times as fast and long or that halfway through the race, you will have to start swimming.

But many things we assume can be planned for, fail. My work in technology has convinced me that no degree of planning will anticipate the problems that will come up. It can brand me a cynic at times, but the best laid plans...ALWAYS go awry. The only value of planning is to rehearse scenarios to help prepare for another scenario you did not anticipate. The ones you anticipate don't happen. It's not that there is no value in planning, but, for example, writing up a series of contingency plans and then handing them to someone else to execute would be idiotic. The value of the planning is in thinking about how to solve problems on the fly and to understand the potential consequences of what you need to watch out for. That can only be done by the people who will be doing or managing the work.

Taleb's book provides a thorough logical and philosophical basis for his contention that much of modern economic theory is a dangerous fraud. My point here is not to summarize the whole book, but to illustrate some key conclusions that extend beyond his essay into the real of real life.

• The fallacy of control - we spend a great deal of effort trying to control future events. Give it up. Not only is the future random, it is random in an unpredictable manner. The turkey probably believed he had worked out a way to get the farmer to feed him more. Don't be a turkey.
• Play the right game. Train for a marathon. Prepare for adversity. But don't think you can anticipate the unexpected. Preparation means practice and subjecting yourself to situations of uncertainty, not optimizing what you already know.
• Embrace uncertainty. The world of mediocristan is the world of the mediocre, but it can be a very successful place. If you can find a place in that world then it is a safer place to be. But don't fool yourself into believing you are in that world when you are not. If you are reading this blog, you live in Extremistan. But Extremistan is a great place because huge change is possible. It's all about being ready for opportunity and then acting on it. The big break will come...so be prepared. But you cannot make it happen.

A big part of dealing with uncertainty is just acceptance that we don't control much. But that doesn't mean we are powerless. We just have to find what we can control and make it count.