Skin In The Game

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A bold work from the author of The Black Swan that challenges many of our long-held beliefs about risk and reward, politics and religion, finance and personal responsibility In his most provocative and practical book yet, one of the foremost thinkers of our time redefines what it means to understand the world, succeed in a profession, contribute to a fair and just society, detect nonsense, and influence others. Citing examples ranging from Hammurabi to Seneca, Antaeus the Giant to Donald Trump, Nassim Nicholas Taleb shows how the willingness to accept one’s own risks is an essential attribute of heroes, saints, and flourishing people in all walks of life. As always both accessible and iconoclastic, Taleb challenges long-held beliefs about the values of those who spearhead military interventions, make financial investments, and propagate religious faiths. Among his insights: • For social justice, focus on symmetry and risk sharing. You cannot make profits and transfer the risks to others, as bankers and large corporations do. You cannot get rich without owning your own risk and paying for your own losses. Forcing skin in the game corrects this asymmetry better than thousands of laws and regulations. • Ethical rules aren’t universal. You’re part of a group larger than you, but it’s still smaller than humanity in general. • Minorities, not majorities, run the world. The world is not run by consensus but by stubborn minorities imposing their tastes and ethics on others. • You can be an intellectual yet still be an idiot. “Educated philistines” have been wrong on everything from Stalinism to Iraq to low-carb diets. • Beware of complicated solutions (that someone was paid to find). A simple barbell can build muscle better than expensive new machines. • True religion is commitment, not just faith. How much you believe in something is manifested only by what you’re willing to risk for it. The phrase “skin in the game” is one we have often heard but rarely stopped to truly dissect. It is the backbone of risk management, but it’s also an astonishingly rich worldview that, as Taleb shows in this book, applies to all aspects of our lives. As Taleb says, “The symmetry of skin in the game is a simple rule that’s necessary for fairness and justice, and the ultimate BS-buster,” and “Never trust anyone who doesn’t have skin in the game. Without it, fools and crooks will benefit, and their mistakes will never come back to haunt them.”

Uncover the unique qualities within YOU that will lead you to find your true purpose, a meaningful career, and show you how to live your biggest life. I know I have a bigger purpose, but how can I find it? Dermalogica founder Jane Wurwand shows you how to turn your unique traits and experiences —especially the ones you may think are your biggest setbacks, into the tools you need to make your dreams a reality. This is not a memoir. This is the journey of how Jane, and how you can find yourself and purpose by harnessing the resilience and creativity within you to drive your own success. Sharing lessons learned, from starting a business on 14,000 dollars of self-funding to growing a multi-million-dollar international brand with a cult-like following, Jane takes you through her real-world experience so you can learn: How to look inward to find your true purpose and let it guide you to live your biggest life. How to discover what type of work will fulfill you and infuse your life with meaning and value. How to overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges between the life you’re living now and the life you know you deserve. How to achieve great success by doing what you love. Business leaders, professionals, entrepreneurs—you don’t have to feel stuck or frustrated any longer, get ready to find your purpose and start living your biggest life. After applying the lessons in Skin in the Game, you will be able to look towards a new future, confident in the choices you are making in your life, in your career, and in your impact on the world. Reading Skin in the Game, you discover the ‘why’ behind Dermalogica’s business model, that the Harvard Business Review called ‘brilliant’, and how the brand turned a skincare product line and salon training platform into a recognized symbol of women’s entrepreneurship around the world.

While the American health care system has consistently been criticized for its noticeable detriments, few have taken the time to recognize the significant benefits and potential of this system. But with Skin in the Game, authors John Hammergren and Phil Harkins provide a comprehensive overview of the history of our health care system, an explanation of its current state, and a picture of the great strides that they see being made in the near future.

In this accessible, prescriptive, and widely applicable manual, Google’s first engineering director and current Innovation Agitator Emeritus provides critical advice for rethinking how we launch a new idea, product, or business, insights to help successfully beat the law of market failure: that most new products will fail, even if competently executed. Millions of people around the world are working to introduce new ideas. Some will turn out to be stunning successes and have a major impact on our world and our culture: The next Google, the next Polio vaccine, the next Harry Potter, the next Red Cross, the next Ford Mustang. Others successes will be smaller and more personal, but no less meaningful: A restaurant that becomes a neighborhood favorite, a biography that tells an important story, a local nonprofit that cares for abandoned pets. Simultaneously, other groups are working equally hard to develop new ideas that, when launched, will fail. Some will fail spectacularly and publicly: New Coke, the movie John Carter, the Ford Edsel. Others failures will be smaller and more private, but no less failure: A home-based business that never takes off, a children’s book that neither publishers nor children have any interest in, a charity for a cause too few people care about. Most people believe that their venture will be successful. But the law of market failure tells us that up to 90 percent of most new products, services, businesses, and initiatives will fail soon after launch—regardless of how promising they sound, how much we commit to them, or how well we execute them. This is a hard fact to accept. Combining detailed case studies with personal insight drawn from his time at Google, his experience as an entrepreneur and consultant, and his lectures at Stanford University and Google, Alberto Savoia offers an unparalleled approach to beating the beast that is market failure: “Make sure you are building The Right It before you build It right,” he advises. In The Right It, he provides lessons on creating your own hard data, a strategy for market engagement, and an introduction to the concept of a pretotype (not a prototype). Groundbreaking, entertaining, and highly practical, this essential guide delivers a proven formula for ensuring ideas, products, services, and businesses succeed.

In the author's point of view, a black swan is an improbable event with three principal characteristics - It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don't know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the 'impossible'.

"There was very fine, an elegant pain, hardly a pain at all, like the swift and fleeting burn of a drop of hot candle wax...Then the blood welled up and began to distort the pure, stark edges of my delicately wrought wound. "The chaos in my head spun itself into a silk of silence. I had distilled myself to the immediacy of hand, blade, blood, flesh." There are an estimated two to three million "cutters" in America, but experts warn that, as with anorexia, this could be just the tip of the iceberg of those affected by this little-known disorder. Cutting has only just begun to enter public consciousness as a dangerous affliction that tends to take hold of adolescent girls and can last, hidden and untreated, well into adulthood. Caroline Kettlewell is an intelligent woman with a promising career and a family. She is also a former cutter, and the first person to tell her own story about living with and overcoming the disorder. She grew up on the campus of a boys' boarding school where her father taught. As she entered adolescence, the combination of a family where frank discussion was avoided and life in what seemed like a fishbowl, where she and her sister were practically the only girls the students ever saw, became unbearable for Caroline. She discovered that the only way to find relief from overpowering feelings of self-consciousness, discomfort, and alienation was to physically hurt herself. She began cutting her arms and legs in the seventh grade, and continued into her twenties. Why would a rational person resort to such extreme measures? How did she recognize and overcome her problem? In a memoir startling for its honesty, humor, and poignancy, Caroline Kettlewell offers a clear-eyed account of her own struggle to survive this debilitating affliction.

Literary ombudsman John Crace never met an important book he didn't like to deconstruct. From Salman Rushdie to John Grisham, Crace retells the big books in just 500 bitingly satirical words, pointing his pen at the clunky plots, stylistic tics and pretensions of Big Ideas, as he turns publishers' golden dream books into dross.

The landmark five-book series--all together in one boxed set The Incerto is an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision making when we don't understand the world, expressed in the form of a personal essay with autobiographical sections, stories, parables, and philosophical, historical, and scientific discussions, in non-overlapping volumes that can be accessed in any order. The main thread is that while there is inordinate uncertainty about what is going on, there is great certainty as to what one should do about it. This boxed set includes: FOOLED BY RANDOMNESS THE BLACK SWAN THE BED OF PROCRUSTES ANTIFRAGILE SKIN IN THE GAME