Nassim Nicholas Taleb has a dream. It’s this: he wants us to celebrate the restaurant owners, the taxi drivers, the market traders and carpenters and all the other risk-takers who put their skin in the game and who drive the economy for the rest of us.
“Let’s call it a National Entrepreneur Day,” declares the author of the best-selling The Black Swan, and have a day devoted to entrepreneurs, because they are the heroes who at times take suicidal risks for the mere survival of the economy: “Optionality makes things work and grow – the UK and the US have a fantastic history in risk-taking, in trial and error, without shame in failing and starting again. We need to recover that spirit.”
Indeed, if modern society is to progress, Taleb says we must honour the “ruined” risk-takers with as much respect as we do soldiers. Just as there is no such thing as a failed soldier – dead or alive, so there is no such thing as a failed entrepreneur.
It’s a sweet dream and a great idea – No 10 are you reading – and just one of many secrets for success that Taleb sets out in his latest work, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder, which is published in paperback next month. And after reading the book, which draws so much on his exotic Levant background, it’s no surprise that skin in the game is so vital to his radical world view. In Antifragile he tells the story of when he was a child and his father was stopped at a road check during the Lebanese civil war. His father refused to do as demanded and the militiaman got angry with him for being disrespectful. So he shot him in the back and the bullet stayed in his chest for the rest of his life.