开年读的第一本书，这本书比预期写的好，不少之前没关注到的概念得到了确认和厘清。收获很大，照例做些摘要。
Every big story could have turned out differently if a few little puffs of nothingness went the other direction.So much of the world hangs by a thread. Events compound in unfathomable ways.I try to keep two things in mind in a world that’s this vulnerable to chance and accident. Every event creates its own offspring, which impact the world in their own special ways. It makes prediction exceedingly hard. The absurdity of past connections should humble your confidence in predicting future ones. The other thing to keep in mind is to have a wider imagination. No matter what the world looks like today, and what seems obvious today, everything can change tomorrow because of some tiny accident no one’s thinking about.
这个世界往往从很多小事开始发生着各种各样的变化，变化是永恒的。这个世界一直在变，从未停歇。即便今天大环境不好，也要对未来充满想象、充满希望。
As Carl Richards says, “Risk is what’s left over after you think you’ve thought of everything.” That’s the real definition of risk—what’s left over after you’ve prepared for the risks you can imagine. Risk is what you don’t see. The biggest risk and the most important news story of the next ten years will be something nobody is talking about today. Risk is dangerous when you think it requires a specific forecast before you start preparing for it. It’s better to have expectations that risk will arrive, though you don’t know when or where, than to rely exclusively on forecasts.
风险的最佳定义，风险并不是你考虑到的事项，而是你没能想到的小概率事件。未来十年最大的风险或最重要的事情都往往是今天还没人提到的事情。应对风险最好的方式就是假定这个风险一定会来，虽然不知道何时何地，
Your happiness depends on your expectations more than anything else. So in a world that tends to get better for most people most of the time, an important life skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving. It’s also one of the hardest. A common storyline of history goes like this: Things get better, wealth increases, technology brings new efficiencies, and medicine saves lives. The quality of life goes up. But people’s expectations then rise by just as much, if not more, because those improvements also benefit other people around you, whose circumstances you anchor to. Happiness is little changed despite the world improving. Investor Charlie Munger once noted that the world isn’t driven by greed; it’s driven by envy. Money buys happiness in the same way drugs bring pleasure: incredible if done right, dangerous if used to mask a weakness, and disastrous when no amount is enough. One is the constant reminder that wealth and happiness is a two-part equation: what you have and what you expect/need. When you realize that each part is equally important, you see that the overwhelming attention we pay to getting more and the negligible attention we put on managing expectations makes little sense, especially because the expectations side can be so much more in your control.
幸福取决于预期，知足是关键。虽然世界变化很快，但幸福感变化不大。钱和幸福的关系也很辩证：用对了很好，用来掩盖弱点就很危险，不知足的话就是场灾难。财富和幸福也是硬币的两面：你想要什么和你需要什么，因此更重要的就是管好自己想要什么、管好预期。
The key thing is that unique minds have to be accepted as a full package, because the things they do well and that we admire cannot be separated from the things we wouldn’t want for ourselves or we look down upon. Part of this idea is realizing that people who are capable of achieving incredible things often take risks that can backfire just as powerfully. Reversion to the mean is one of the most common stories in history. It’s the main character in economies, markets, countries, companies, careers—everything. Part of the reason it happens is because the same personality traits that push people to the top also increase the odds of pushing them over the edge.
福祸相依，好坏相融。成大事者也会有遇到大的灾难，这就是均值回归，历史上最常见的故事，无处不在。部分原因就是因为路径依赖导致爬的越高摔得越重。
If you said you were 100 percent confident that your answer was correct and it turned out to be wrong, you failed the entire test. If you said you were zero percent confident and your answer happened to be correct, you got no credit. Everything in between gave you a confidence-adjusted score.A common trait of human behavior is the burning desire for certainty despite living in an uncertain and probabilistic world.“With a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is apt to happen,” Mosteller said. That’s part of why the world seems so crazy, and why once-in-a-lifetime events seem to happen regularly. In any normal person’s life, miracles should occur at the rate of roughly one per month: The proof of the law is simple. During the time that we are awake and actively engaged in living our lives, roughly for eight hours each day, we see and hear things happening at a rate of one per second. So the total number of events that happen to us is about 30,000 per day, or about a million per month. People don’t want accuracy. They want certainty. A lot of what goes on in the prediction world is an attempt to rid yourself of the painful reality of not knowing what’s going to happen next. When you realize that making people feel better is more appealing than giving people useful figures, you start to see why thinking in probabilities is rare.
信心调整分数很有意思：信心十足+对了是最好的，信心十足+错了就是失败；没信心但蒙对了也不能得分。人对确定性的追求很有意思，完全不顾实际是生活在一个不确定的概率世界。只要样本量大，最坏的事情一定会发生，这就是难得一遇的事情经常发生的道理。永远不要低估不可能的事情。
Andrew Carnegie said he was as proud of his charm and ability to befriend people as he was of his business acumen. Elon Musk is as skilled at getting investors to believe a vision as he is at engineering. When a topic is complex, stories are like leverage. Ken Burns once said, “The common stories are one plus one equals two. We get it, they make sense. But the good stories are about one plus one equals three.” That’s leverage. The most persuasive stories are about what you want to believe is true, or are an extension of what you’ve experienced firsthand.
复杂的事情用故事讲清楚很重要。1+1=2是一般故事，1+1=3才是好故事。
Historian Will Durant once said, “Logic is an invention of man and may be ignored by the universe.” And it often is, which can drive you mad if you expect the world to work in rational ways. Keynes, the British economist, had discovered in his work that economies are not machines. They have souls, emotions, and feelings. Keynes called them “animal spirits.”Hill discovered the same, but for our bodies. He called them “moral factors.” Our bodies are not machines, and we shouldn’t expect them to perform as such. They have feelings, emotions, and fears, all of which regulate what we’re capable of. Every investment price, every market valuation, is just a number from today multiplied by a story about tomorrow. Author Robert Greene once wrote, “The need for certainty is the greatest disease the mind faces.” It’s what causes us to overlook that the world is not one big spreadsheet whose outputs can be computed. We’d never get anywhere if everyone viewed the world as a clean set of rational rules to follow.
宇宙其实不讲逻辑，这个社会也并不是按逻辑或者表格的方式运行，因此无法精确计算。人性的部分就是凯恩斯的动物精神。估值的本质就是今天的数字乘上明天的故事。
When an economy is stable, people get optimistic. When people get optimistic, they go into debt. When they go into debt, the economy becomes unstable. Minsky’s big idea was that stability is destabilizing. A lack of recessions actually plants the seeds of the next recession, which is why we can never get rid of them. That’s hardly intuitive, but here again—calm plants the seeds of crazy. What calm planting the seeds of crazy does is important: It makes us fundamentally underestimate the odds of things going wrong, and the consequences of something going wrong. Things can become the most dangerous when people perceive them to be the safest. The only way to know we’ve exhausted all potential opportunity from markets—the only way to identify the top—is to push them not only past the point where the numbers stop making sense, but beyond the stories people believe about those numbers. There are two things you can do about it. One is accepting that crazy doesn’t mean broken. Crazy is normal; beyond the point of crazy is normal. The second is realizing the power of enough. Investor Chamath Palihapitiya was once asked about earning the highest returns, and remarked: I would really love to just compound at fifteen percent per year. Because if I can do that for fifty years that’s just enormous. Just slow and steady against hard problems. Maybe there’s more potential out there, but it’s fine to say, “You know what, I’m pretty happy with this level of risk and I’m fine just watching this game play out.
经济增长、乐观情绪、过度负债的人类循环，稳定会慢慢摧毁自己，这就是这个世界的样子。冷静也是疯狂的种子，让我们低估小概率事情的发生概率，然后这些事就确定性地发生了，造成巨大破坏。因此要接纳疯狂，疯狂不是问题，是常态；同时要用好知足的力量，知足知进退才能避免灾难。
For every type of animal there is a most convenient size, and a change in size inevitably carries with it a change of form,” Haldane wrote. A most convenient size. A proper state where things work well but break when you try to scale them to a different size or speed. It applies to so many things in life. There’s a “most convenient” investing time horizon—probably somewhere around ten years or more. Nassim Taleb says he’s a libertarian at the federal level, a Republican at the state level, a Democrat at the local level, and a socialist at the family level. People handle risk and responsibility in totally different ways when a group scales from 4 people to 100 to 100,000 to 100 million. Same for corporate culture. A management style that works brilliantly at a ten-person company can destroy a thousand-person company, which is a hard lesson to learn when some companies grow that fast in a few short years. Supercharged growth can lead to tissue damage and, as the biologists put it, “may only be achieved by diversion of resources away from maintenance and repair of damaged biomolecules.” Slowed-down growth does the opposite, “allowing an increased allocation to maintenance and repair.”
Robert Greene writes: “The greatest impediment to creativity is your impatience, the almost inevitable desire to hurry up the process, express something, and make a splash. An important thing about this topic is that most great things in life—from love to careers to investing—gain their value from two things: patience and scarcity. Patience to let something grow, and scarcity to admire what it grows into. But what are two of the most common tactics when people pursue something great? Trying to make it faster and bigger. It’s always been a problem, and always will be.
适合的规模最重要。规模是个重要的参数和规律，基金也是如此，不少大基金溃败的道理竟然这么简单。不同的规模要适用不同的策略，不主动适应就会出问题。超常增长是类似问题，稳定增长才是最优解。因此，生命中最重要的就是耐心和稀缺，耐心以静待事务按期合适的速度成长，而不是相反。
A constant truth you see throughout history is that the biggest changes and the most important innovations don’t happen when everyone is happy and things are going well. They tend to occur during, and after, a terrible event. When people are a little panicked, shocked, worried, and when the consequences of not acting quickly are too painful to bear. Militaries are engines of innovation because they occasionally deal with problems so important—so urgent, so vital—that money and manpower are removed as obstacles, and those involved collaborate in ways that are hard to emulate during calm times.
压力下才有创造性发挥，不要走进那个良夜，也不要追求舒适的状态。舒适区最大的问题就是把创造性扼杀掉了。痛苦才能带来成长。这恰恰是我们当前的问题所在：太舒服了，感受不到太大的压力。
But there’s another story about the 1930s that rarely gets mentioned: it was, by far, the most productive and technologically progressive decade in U.S. history. The number of problems people solved, and the ways they discovered how to build stuff more efficiently, is a forgotten story of the ’30s that helps explain a lot of why the rest of the twentieth century was so prosperous.”
大萧条居然是美国最具创造力的时代。当下的经济困境也有这样的效果，包括寒冬。每一场寒冬都是让我们打下更扎实的基础，不要浪费任何一个寒冬。
President Richard Nixon once observed: The unhappiest people of the world are those in the international watering places like the South Coast of France, and Newport, and Palm Springs, and Palm Beach. Going to parties every night. Playing golf every afternoon. Drinking too much. Talking too much. Thinking too little. Retired. No purpose. So while there are those that would totally disagree with this and say “Gee, if I could just be a millionaire! That would be the most wonderful thing.” If I could just not have to work every day, if I could just be out fishing or hunting or playing golf or traveling, that would be the most wonderful life in the world—they don’t know life. Because what makes life mean something is purpose. A goal. The battle, the struggle—even if you don’t win it.”
That’s a big takeaway from history, and it leads to a realization that will always be true: Be careful what you wish for. A carefree and stress-free life sounds wonderful only until you recognize the motivation and progress it prevents. No one cheers for hardship—nor should they—but we should recognize that it’s the most potent fuel of problem-solving, serving as both the root of what we enjoy today and the seed of opportunity for what we’ll enjoy tomorrow.”
太舒服之后的空虚实际是最大的不开心的来源、抑郁的来源。如果把暴富、天天玩乐当成生活目标——恰恰是不懂生活的意义。有意义的生活需要有目的感、有目标、需要战斗、需要斗争。苦难才是有意义的来源，躺平不是。这段话我感觉都应该挂墙上了。
Warren Buffett says it takes twenty years to build a reputation and five minutes to destroy one. A lot of things work just like that. It’s a natural part of how the world works, driven by the fact that good news comes from compounding, which always takes time, but bad news comes from a loss in confidence or a catastrophic error that can occur in the blink of an eye. That’s the real lesson from evolution: If you have a big number in the exponent slot, you do not need extraordinary change to deliver extraordinary results. It’s not intuitive, but it’s so powerful.
长期努力的成果往往会被一夜间毁掉，这就是历史。
A big thing to know about how people think is that progress requires optimism and pessimism to coexist. They seem like conflicting mindsets, so it’s more common for people to prefer one or the other. But knowing how to balance the two has always been, and always will be, one of life’s most important skills. The best financial plan is to save like a pessimist and invest like an optimist. That idea—the belief that things will get better mixed with the reality that the path between now and then will be a continuous chain of setback, disappointment, surprise, and shock—shows up all over history, in all areas of life. That’s the balance—planning like a pessimist and dreaming like an optimist. That mix is counterintuitive, but it’s so powerful when done right. Remaining optimistic while accepting the reality of despair is fascinating to witness. In the middle is the sweet spot, what I call the rational optimists: those who acknowledge that history is a constant chain of problems and disappointments and setbacks, but who remain optimistic because they know setbacks don’t prevent eventual progress. They sound like hypocrites and flip-floppers, but often they’re just looking further ahead than other people.
悲喜交加才能进步。长期乐观/信心+短期悲观/务实，也是所谓的理性乐观派的意义。前途是光明的搭配道路是曲折的，所以要乐观投资，保守储蓄；所以要乐观去梦想，保守地做计划；虽然反直觉但很有用。接受短期的苦难/悲观，保持对长期的乐观，也是脚踏实地+仰望星空的结合。历史虽然充满了问题和失望，但最终还是会前进，也是任何苦难所阻挡不了的，这就是非常宏大和值得学习的历史观。
Not maximizing your potential is actually the sweet spot in a world where perfecting one skill compromises another. Evolution has spent 3.8 billion years testing and proving the idea that some inefficiency is good. Many people strive for efficient lives, where no hour is wasted. But an overlooked skill that doesn’t get enough attention is the idea that wasting time can be a great thing. Albert Einstein put it this way: I take time to go for long walks on the beach so that I can listen to what is going on inside my head. If my work isn’t going well, I lie down in the middle of a workday and gaze at the ceiling while I listen and visualize what goes on in my imagination. Someone once asked Charlie Munger what Warren Buffett’s secret was. “I would say half of all the time he spends is sitting on his ass and reading.” He has a lot of time to think. The traditional eight-hour work schedule is great if your job is repetitive or physically constraining. But for the large and growing number of “thought jobs,” it might not be. You might be better off taking two hours in the morning to stay at home thinking about some big problem. Room for error is often viewed as a cost, an anchor, an inefficiency. But in the long run it can have some of the highest payoffs imaginable.
不要走极端，也不要极端的效率，要给生活留白、给工作留白。巴菲特的秘密就是大量时间留白用来阅读和思考。有留白、容错空间是很重要的投资。
Same goes for diets, finances, marketing . . . everyone wants a shortcut. It’s always been this way, but I suspect it’s getting worse as technology inflates our benchmark for how fast results should happen. Charlie Munger once noted: “The safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want. It’s such a simple idea. It’s the golden rule. You want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end. “If you’re efficient, you’re doing it the wrong way. The right way is the hard way. The show was successful because I micromanaged it—every word, every line, every take, every edit, every casting. If you’re efficient, you’re doing it the wrong way. That is so counterintuitive. But I think it perfectly highlights the danger of shortcuts. Part of this is simply understanding the costs of success.
Hard模式才是唯一正确的模式。捷径、过于强调效率是错误的选择。
Evolution is good at what it does. And one of the things it does is give animals bigger bodies over time. Going public is a sign that a company has found enough competitive advantage to scale into a large corporation. But almost 40 percent of all public companies lost all their value from 1980 to 2014. That was why Edison was so optimistic about innovation. He explained: You can never tell what apparently small discovery will lead to. Somebody discovers something and immediately a host of experimenters and inventors are playing all the variations upon it. One takeaway here is that it’s easy to always feel like we’re falling behind. In most eras it can feel like we haven’t invented anything useful for ten or twenty years. But that’s merely because it can take ten or twenty years for an innovation to become useful. When you realize that progress is made step-by-step, slowly over time, you realize that tiny little innovations that no one thinks much of are the seeds for what has the potential to compound into something great.
进化的方向是让动物体型越来越大。上市后40%的公司会归零。爱迪生对创新是乐观的，感觉可能慢点，但实际一直在进展中，慢慢积累中改变着人类进程。
Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich. Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living. Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke. Incentives are the most powerful force in the world and can get people to justify or defend almost anything. When you understand how powerful incentives can be, you stop being surprised when the world lurches from one absurdity to the next. If asked, “How many people in the world are truly crazy?” I might say, I don’t know, 3 percent to 5 percent. But if I asked, “How many people in the world would be willing to do something crazy if their incentives were right?” I’d say, oh, easily 50 percent or more. There can be a difference between knowing what’s right and making a living delivering what you know to be right. This may be most common in investing, law, and medicine, when “do nothing” is the best answer, but “do something” is the career incentive. When good and honest people can be incentivized into crazy behavior, it’s easy to underestimate the odds of the world going off the rails.
激励是很强大的力量。做对的事情和被生活所迫做对的事情是不一样的。要区分。要注意。这个社会之所以疯狂也是有这些扭曲的激励存在。
Nothing is more persuasive than what you’ve experienced firsthand. In 1943 Franklin Roosevelt effectively capped incomes at the equivalent of $400,000 per year, with everything above that taxed at 94 percent. Jim Carrey once said, “I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.” Part of this is the same reason that predicting how you’ll respond to risk is difficult: It’s hard to imagine the full context until you experience it firsthand. Future fortunes are imagined in a vacuum, but reality is always lived with the good and bad taken together, competing for attention. You might think you know how it’ll feel. Then you experience it firsthand and you realize, ah, okay. It’s more complicated than you thought.”
百闻不如一试，亲自经历是最重要的。特别是疯狂的历史，美国居然个税曾高达94%。风险也是如此，不经历是不知道的。
Long-term thinking is easier to believe in than to accomplish. Everything worthwhile has a price, and the prices aren’t always obvious. The real price of long term—the skills required, the mentality needed—is easy to minimize and often summarized with simple phrases like “Be more patient,” as if that explains why so many people can’t. Long-term thinking can be a deceptive safety blanket that people assume lets them bypass the painful and unpredictable short run. But it never does. It might be the opposite: The longer your time horizon, the more calamities and disasters you’ll experience. Baseball player Dan Quisenberry once said, “The future is much like the present, only longer.”Long term is less about time horizon and more about flexibility. Benjamin Graham said, “The purpose of the margin of safety is to render the forecast unnecessary.” The more flexibility you have, the less you need to know what happens next. There are two types of information: permanent and expiring. Permanent information is harder to notice because it’s buried in books rather than blasted in headlines. But its benefit is huge. It’s not just that permanent information never expires, letting you accumulate it. It also compounds over time, leveraging off what you’ve already learned. Expiring information tells you what happened; permanent information tells you why something happened and is likely to happen again. That “why” can translate and interact with stuff you know about other topics, which is where the compounding comes in.”
长期思维是需要有耐心的。越长期所经历的困难就会越多，未来不一定会更好，只是有一个今天。长期也不只是时间维度，更多的其实是灵活性。区分永久信息和过期信息。
Simplicity is the hallmark of truth—we should know better, but complexity continues to have a morbid attraction. When you give an academic audience a lecture that is crystal clear from alpha to omega, your audience feels cheated. . . . The sore truth is that complexity sells better. When you first start to study a field, it seems like you have to memorize a zillion things. You don’t. What you need is to identify the core principles—generally three to twelve of them—that govern the field. The million things you thought you had to memorize are simply various combinations of the core principles. This is so vital. In finance, spending less than you make, saving the difference, and being patient is perhaps 90 percent of what you need to know to do well.
简单才是这个世界的真相。复杂的背后是这些简单原则构成的。
There’s a long history of people adapting and rebuilding while the scars of their ordeal remain forever, changing how they think about risk, reward, opportunities, and goals for as long as they live. An important component of human behavior is that people who’ve had different experiences than you will think differently than you do. They’ll have different goals, outlooks, wishes, and values. So most debates are not actual disagreements; they’re people with different experiences talking over each other.
伤痛好了，但伤疤永恒。大家会根据灾难来调整自己的行为和想法。这次泡沫破裂也是如此。