The other day I went to our local bookshop on a mission to buy a book by Robert Wilson – I had just devoured his “Blind Man of Seville” and wanted more. Glancing around the shelves I saw Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “Fooled by Randomness”, saying buy me. So I did.
I have written approvingly about Taleb before ( Here, here and here). His message that life is “more random than we think” is close to the ideas I talked about in my manifesto, “Purposive Drift: making it up as we go along.”
He says in his preface that he wrote it for fun and hoped it would be read for pleasure. Well it’s a good read, written in an informal style, with lots of stories. It’s also an immensely wise book and, for those of us who celebrate the richness and unpredictability of living, a very optimistic one.
What really warmed me towards him was a section late in the book where he talks about the way that schedules can block us from enjoy the random pleasures of life. As he says:
“I am convinced that we are not made for clear-cut, well-delineated schedules. We are made to live like firemen, with downtime for lounging and meditating between calls, under the protection of protective uncertainty.”
And I would say, Amen to that.