Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues that the most powerful forces in life and history are the ones we don’t see coming. “Black Swans”—rare, extreme, and unpredictable events—reshape everything from markets to science to personal lives, yet we persist in pretending the world is orderly and forecastable.

Taleb distinguishes between Mediocristan, where averages work, and Extremistan, where outliers rule. Modern finance and technology live in the latter, making our tidy models dangerously naïve. He dissects our blind spots—storytelling after the fact, confirmation bias, and faith in experts—and urges us to stop predicting and start preparing.

His advice is pragmatic: design systems that can survive chaos and even benefit from it. Favor resilience over precision, simplicity over theory, and curiosity over certainty. The Black Swan reframes risk itself, reminding us that what we don’t know usually matters far more than what we do.