I bought this book by mistake because I thought that it would be an anecdote about statistics of unlikelihood. In fact, it turns out to be more of a philosophical discussion on the importance of the improbable, and much less on statistical stuff. As for the latter, about 80% of the story was devoted to the boring bell-curve and very little on anything else. So if it has never occurred to you that the world has been shaped by a few rare and unexpected events, and you need some philosophers to convince you of it, then this book is for you.

No one can argue that the thigs that change and shape our lives are not the ones we expect to. It's the things we don't even know are coming that will cahnge our path. It's what you don't know that you don't know. I loved this books perspective.

Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan is about how people, including academics, are unable to properly gauge uncertainty thus setting themselves up for disaster, or Black Swan events.

Black swan events are like one-time events or very infrequent unpredictable events that disrupt the mediocrity of human life. Examples of Black Swan events are the collapse of LTCM, The Crash of '87, and maybe the housing collapse. Black Swans plague human history; however for many reasons people, including academics, are blind to them. This book tries to make the reader aware of Black Swans and give reasons why people are blind to them. This book also contends why mainstream academics have it wrong when gauging uncertainty.

One of the problems I had was that this book wasn't very cohesive. The book goes from one subject to subject not in a streamline manner. I had to jot down notes to keep track on what was written. I would have given a 4-star for this, but the idea of Black Swan events was compelling enough for a good rating.

This book is an easier read than Fooled by Randomness. It was slow reading though because it is pretty deep. It was a good book.

Here are the highlights and my takeaway:
- Guassian bell curves are for most applications worthless, but people use the curves to gauge uncertainty.
- This book goes against conventional wisdom
- Despite the occurrences of Black Swans, people fool themselves into thinking that Black Swans were predictable and hence unimpressive events. Even worse, people set themselves up for a Black Swan event instead of trying to avoid the possibility of a Black Swan.
- Black Swans live in scalable environments, instead of non-scalable environments. People live as if in a non-scalable world when the modern world is more like a scalable world.

This book provides lots of reasons why people are blind to Black Swans. Blacks Swans are tough to predict to begin with, but the problem is compounded when people are blind to Black Swans. This book tries to make the reader aware of the existence of Black Swan events.

I read Thomas Sowell's Intellectuals and Society and I think there is a bit of crossover between both books. Taleb's book is not political; however Taleb's description of the Platonifiers is similar to Sowell's description of Intellectuals. Both Sowell and Taleb mention the idea of knowledge being spread across the populace. Sowell mentions that knowledge is too vast to be contained by the few. Taleb mentions that even people like the Platonifiers lack the knowledge to predict future given the numerous and unknown variables.

If you're a trailblazer who is puzzled why you cannot seem to get people to go along with you, this book is for you. Also, I would recommend this book to those who liked Taleb's Fooled by Randomness and to those who are fans of Malcolm Gladwell's books. This book is a whole lot easier to read than his other book, Fooled by Randomness. This book is pretty deep so expect slow reading.

The collapse of Lehman Brothers, the failure of Long-Term Capital Management, the downfall of Enron--these are all examples of Black Swans: events that are extremely improbable, but if and when--as Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out, they happen have a catastrophic impact. Far from the financial cautionary tale I expected, Taleb's unorthodox and often irreverent approach takes his argument from the world of finance and stretches it across many disciplines including politics, history and philosophy. Along the way Taleb derides nearly every profession for their ignorance, no doubt a result of the harsh criticism he has received from academia. Once you get past his condescension and verbosity, this book contains invaluable insights that should be required reading for all MBA students.

this book is riveting...i usually read spiritual books but literally couldn't put this one down...however my new favorite inspirational book is Live Like A Fruit Fly -also on amazon