Nassim Nicholas Taleb's top life tips

1. Skepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be skeptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.
2. Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.
3. It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.
4. Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.
5. Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.
6. Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.
7. Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).
8. Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.
9. Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.
10. Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

From the end of this article, "Nassim Nicholas Taleb: the prophet of boom and doom".   Nassim Nicholas Taleb is one of my heros.  I've only read Fooled By Randomness, the book before Black Swan, but the ideas have been resonating with me for years.  Basically, embrace randomness, accept big failure, focus on how you do things not necessarily whether they have immediate results.  Living with good intentions is really about the only thing we can really control. 

I also love his new emphasis on social interaction as the only primary filter on the world's information.  Go to lots of parties and listen.  Dress well for your own execution.

I was gonna include some more excerpts but there are too many good ones.  Just read the whole thing.