Dr John, takes his work seriously, he has a PhD in electrical engineering. An expert in computers and statistics his key role for the company he works with is ‘risk management’.
Tony, from Brooklyn, moved to New Jersey, never finished school, worked as a clerk in a back room in a bank, figured out how loans are done, quit and went into real estate, now successful and owns a number of properties.
So I meet up with them.
I take a normal coin and flip it 99 times and it comes up heads every time. What are the odds of it coming up heads on the next throw”? I say.
Dr. John: “Trival question. One half of course, since you are assuming 50% odds for each throw.
Tony: “You are either full of crap or a pure sucker to buy that :50 pehent business. The coin gotta be loaded”.
Ever wondered why so many straight A students end up going nowhere in life while someone who lagged behind is now getting the shekels? In an IQ test, Dr John would vastly outperform Tony. However one person looks at situations through ‘known tried and proved factors’ the other through ‘street smarts’ and his enormous curiosity about the texture of reality and his own lack of ‘formal education’. Tony does something that Dr. John could never do and never quite understand, Tony thinks outside the box.
This is a paraphrase from one of the most amazing books I’ve ever read “The Black Swan” by Nassim Nicolas Taleb. You read this book and you realise how and why we have people like Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Bill Gates etc.
