Do Not Set Goals, Optimize Or Predict According To These Five Books — Reading/Listening Tips W6

(You can also listen to this article on Youtube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Google Podcasts)

Before we begin, these five recommendations have one thing in common: they are contrarian and advice unpredictability. They have fundamentally changed my worldview, which you will see in the upcoming articles (spoiler alert, I no longer advocate for goals and vision). Five golden gems in other words.

Books of the week

In this classic, Nassim Taleb defines what black swan phenomena are. They are unpredictable events with extreme positive or negative impacts that can only be explained retrospectively. Taleb gives many examples illustrating the simple fact that we humans cannot predict the future. We simply cannot.

Taleb heavily criticizes the establishment, mostly within finance, for trying to predict the future and using the bell curve. Probabilities are for extremes, not for mediocre. As a recommendation to all of us out there, we should not predict the future. Just be humble.

You can check out the book in various formats here.