The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Mother Nature has given us some defense mechanisms: as in Aesop’s fable, one of these is our ability to consider that the grapes we cannot (or did not) reach are sour. But an aggressively stoic prior disdain and rejection of the grapes is even more rewarding. Be aggressive; be the one to resign, if you have the guts.

It is more difficult to be a loser in a game you set up yourself.

In Black Swan terms, this means that you are exposed to the improbable only if you let it control you. You always control what you do; so make this your end.

THE END

But all these ideas, all this philosophy of induction, all these problems with knowledge, all these wild opportunities and scary possible losses, everything palls in front of the following metaphysical consideration.

I am sometimes taken aback by how people can have a miserable day or get angry because they feel cheated by a bad meal, cold coffee, a social rebuff, or a rude reception. Recall my discussion in Chapter 8 on the difficulty in seeing the true odds of the events that run your own life. We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurrence of monstrous proportions.

Imagine a speck of dust next to a planet a billion times the size of the earth. The speck of dust represents the odds in favor of your being born; the huge planet would be the odds against it. So stop sweating the small stuff. Don’t be like the ingrate who got a castle as a present and worried about the mildew in the bathroom. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth—remember that you are a Black Swan. And thank you for reading my book.

EPILOGUE: YEVGENIA’S WHITE SWANS

Yevgenia Krasnova went into the long hibernation that was necessary for producing a new book. She stayed in New York City, where she found it easiest to find tranquillity, alone with her text. It was easiest to concentrate after long periods during which she was surrounded by crowds, hoping to run into Nero so she could make a snide remark to him, perhaps humiliate him, possibly win him back. She canceled her e-mail account, switched to writing longhand, since she found it soothing, and hired a secretary to type her text. She spent eight years writing, erasing, correcting, venting her occasional anger at the secretary, interviewing new secretaries, and quietly rewriting. Her apartment was full of smoke, with papers strewn on every surface. Like all artists she remained dissatisfied with the state of completion of her work, yet she felt that she had gone far deeper than with her first book. She laughed at the public who extolled her earlier work, for she now found it shallow, hurriedly completed, and undistilled.

When the new book, which was aptly called The Loop, came out, Yevgenia was wise enough to avoid the press and ignore her reviews, and stayed insulated from the external world. As expected by her publisher, the reviews were laudatory. But, strangely, few were buying. People must be talking about the book without reading it, he thought. Her fans had been waiting for it and talking about it for years. The publisher, who now owned a very large collection of pink glasses and led a flamboyant lifestyle, was presently betting the farm on Yevgenia. He had no other hits and none in sight. He needed to score big to pay for his villa in Carpentras in Provence and his dues on the financial settlement with his estranged wife, as well as to buy a new convertible Jaguar (pink). He had been certain that he had a good shot with Yevgenia’s long-awaited book, and he could not figure out why almost everyone called it a masterpiece yet no one was buying it. A year and a half later, The Loop was effectively out of print. The publisher, now in severe financial distress, thought he knew the reason: the book was “too f***ing long!”—Yevgenia should have written a shorter one. After a long but soothing lachrymal episode, Yevgenia thought of the characters in the rainy novels of Georges Simenon and Graham Greene. They lived in a state of numbing and secure mediocrity. Second-rateness had charm, Yevgenia thought, and she had always preferred charm over beauty.

So Yevgenia’s second book too was a Black Swan.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I derived an unexpected amount of enjoyment in writing this book—in fact, it just wrote itself—and I want the reader to experience the same. I would like to thank the following friends.