The phenomenal international bestseller that shows us how to stop trying to predict everything - and take advantage of uncertainty

What have the invention of the wheel, Pompeii, the Wall Street Crash, Harry Potter and the internet got in common? Why are all forecasters con-artists? Why should you never run for a train or read a newspaper?

This book is all about Black Swans: the random events that underlie our lives, from bestsellers to world disasters. Their impact is huge; they're impossible to predict; yet after they happen we always try to rationalize them.

'Taleb is a bouncy and even exhilarating guide ... I came to relish what he said, and even develop a sneaking affection for him as a person' Will Self, Independent on Sunday

'He leaps like some superhero of the mind' Boyd Tonkin, Independent

From the bestselling author of The Black Swan, a bold book that challenges many of our long-held beliefs about risk and reward, politics and religion, finance and personal responsibility

'Skin in the game means that you do not pay attention to what people say, only to what they do, and how much of their neck they are putting on the line'

Citizens, artisans, police, fishermen, political activists and entrepreneurs all have skin in the game. Policy wonks, corporate executives, many academics, bankers and most journalists don't. It's all about having something to lose and sharing risks with others. In his most provocative and practical book yet, Nassim Nicholas Taleb shows that skin in the game, often seen as the foundation of risk management, in fact applies to all aspects of our lives.

In his inimitable style, Taleb draws on everything from Antaeus the Giant to Hammurabi to Donald Trump, from ethics to used car salesmen, to create a jaw-dropping framework for understanding this idea. Among his insights:

For social justice, focus on symmetry and risk sharing.

Minorities, not majorities, run the world.

You can be an intellectual yet still be an idiot.

Beware of complicated solutions (that someone was paid to find).

Just as The Black Swan did during the 2007 financial crisis, Skin in the Game comes at precisely the right moment to challenge our long-held beliefs about risk, reward, politics, religion and business - and make us rethink everything we thought we knew.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the bestselling author of The Black Swan and one of the foremost thinkers of our time, reveals how to thrive in an uncertain world.

Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls antifragile are things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish.

In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. Here Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better.

What's more, the antifragile is immune to prediction errors and protected from adverse events. Why is the city-state better than the nation-state, why is debt bad for you, and why is what we call "efficient" not efficient at all? Why do government responses and social policies protect the strong and hurt the weak? Why should you write your resignation letter before starting on the job? How did the sinking of the Titanic save lives? The book spans innovation by trial and error, life decisions, politics, urban planning, war, personal finance, economic systems and medicine, drawing on modern street wisdom and ancient sources.

Antifragile is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world.

Erudite, witty, and iconoclastic, Taleb's message is revolutionary: the antifragile, and only the antifragile, will make it.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has devoted his life to problems of uncertainty, probability, and knowledge and has led three careers around this focus, as a businessman-trader, a philosophical essayist, and an academic researcher. Although he now spends most of his time working in intense seclusion in his study, in the manner of independent scholars, he is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University's Polytechnic Institute. His main subject matter is "decision making under opacity," that is, a map and a protocol on how we should live in a world we don't understand.

His books Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan have been published in thirty-three languages.

Taleb believes that prizes, honorary degrees, awards, and ceremonialism debase knowledge by turning it into a spectator sport.

In diesem bahnbrechenden Buch, das mittlerweile weltweit zum Klassiker geworden ist, entwickelt Taleb seine einflussreiche Denkfigur und Maxime für die ungewisse Realität, in der wir leben und handeln.

Talebs Weltbestseller – „Der Schwarze Schwan: Die Macht höchst unwahrscheinlicher Ereignisse“ und „Der Schwarze Schwan: Konsequenzen aus der Krise“ – in einem Band und eingeleitet mit einem neuen Essay des Autors

• »Eines der zwölf einflussreichsten Bücher seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg.« (Sunday Times)
• »›Der Schwarze Schwan‹ hat meine Sicht auf die Welt verändert.« (Daniel Kahneman, Nobelpreisträger)
• Der Weltbestseller: übersetzt in 33 Sprachen mit über 3 Millionen verkauften Exemplaren
• »Taleb zerpflückt mit großer Lust und einem guten Schuss Polemik unseren offenbar unerschütterlichen Glauben an die Vorhersehbarkeit von Ereignissen.« (SWR)

In this profound and playful book, Nassim Nicholas Taleb presents his ideas about life in the form of aphorisms, the world's earliest - and most memorable - literary form.

Procrustes was a character from Greek mythology who abducted travellers and invited them to spend the night in a special bed, which they had to fit to perfection. They never did. Those who were too tall had their legs chopped off; those who were too short were stretched.

Every aphorism here is about a Procrustean bed of sorts - we humans, facing the limits of our knowledge, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies and pre-packaged narratives. Only by embracing the unexpected - and accepting what we don't know - can we see the world as it really is.

¿Qué es un cisne negro? Para empezar, es un suceso improbable, sus consecuencias son importantes y todas las explicaciones que se puedan ofrecer a posteriori no tienen en cuenta el azar y sólo buscan encajar lo imprevisible en un modelo perfecto.
El éxito de Google y You Tube, y hasta ell 11-S, son "cisnes negros". Para Nassim Nicholas Taleb, los cisnes negros son parte integrante de nuestro mundo, desde el auge de las religiones hasta los acontecimientos de nuestra vida personal.

¿Por qué no podemos identificar este fenómeno hasta que ya ha sucedido? Según el autor, ello se debe a que los humanos nos empeñamos en investigar las cosas ya sabidas, olvidándonos de lo que desconocemos.  Ello nos impide reconocer las oportunidades y nos hace demasiado vulnerables al impulso de simplificar, narrar y categorizar, olvidándonos de recompensar a quienes saben imaginar lo "imposible".

Elegante, sorprendente, y con reflexiones de alcance universal, El cisne negro transformará nuestra manera de mirar el mundo. Taleb es un escritor ameno, ingenioso e irreverente, con un profundo conocimiento de temas tan dispares como  la ciencia cognitiva, el mundo de los negocios y  la teoría de la probabilidad. De hecho, El cisne negro es auténtico cisne negro en sí mismo.