8. A prophet is not someone with special visions, just someone blind to most of what others see.

Same as above. You’ll win by default if you simply avoid the mistakes others make. Those who made a fortune betting against housing didn’t have special insider knowledge. They simply didn’t believe that housing prices could go up forever.

9. The best test of whether someone is extremely stupid (or extremely wise) is whether financial and political news makes sense to him. 

One of the biggest disservices the media cranks out are daily market roundups that begin, “Markets fell/rose today on news that …” followed by a random and usually meaningless datapoint. Markets go up. Markets go down. Get over it and stop trying to connect the dots.

10. What they call "risk" I call opportunity; but what they call "low risk" opportunity I call a sucker problem. 

The past three years, explained in one line.

I had just begun to read the book when there it was, right on the bottom of page 5: “Your brain is most intelligent when you don’t instruct it on what to do – something people who take showers discover on occasion.” I was floored. None other than Nassim Nicholas Taleb had confirmed what I always suspected. There is value in shower thinking.

Not surprisingly, more than a few of the aphorisms in Taleb’s book are brilliant. At the least, most will cause you to stop, put the book down, close your eyes, and think. Some may make you want to run to any other person in the room to share it with them, in the hope that an interesting discussion might ensue. If nothing else, Taleb’s latest may be the ultimate bathroom book for thinkers.

Since this is a business column, here is one of Taleb’s many aphorisms that relate to business: “In science, you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.” Try that one out at your next Cambridge cocktail party.