Heroes Were Not Library Rats
Taleb argues that learning courage requires practice and contact with people who have taken risks. He recommends reading original texts and writers with practical experience, and warns that academic knowledge of courage can remain detached from action.
THE IDEA
Heroes Were Not Library Rats
If you want to study classical values such as courage or learn about stoicism, don't necessarily look for classicists. One is never a career academic without a reason. Read the texts themselves: Seneca, Caesar, or Marcus Aurelius, when possible. Or read commentators on the classics who were doers themselves, such as Montaigne—people who at some point had some skin in the game, then retired to write books. Avoid the intermediary, when possible. Or fuhgetaboud the texts, just engage in acts of courage.
For studying courage in textbooks doesn't make you any more courageous than eating cow meat makes you bovine.
By some mysterious mental mechanism, people fail to realize that the principal thing you can learn from a professor is how to be a professor—and the chief thing you can learn from, say, a life coach or inspirational speaker is how to become a life coach or inspirational speaker. So remember that the heroes of history were not classicists and library rats, those people who live vicariously in their texts. They were people of deeds and had to be endowed with the spirit of risk taking. To get into their psyches, you will need someone other than a career professor teaching stoicism.fn7 They almost always don't get it (actually, they never get it). In my experience, from a series of personal fights, many of these "classicists," who know in intimate detail what people of courage such as Alexander, Cleopatra, Caesar, Hannibal, Julian, Leonidas, Zenobia ate for breakfast, can't produce a shade of intellectual valor. Is it that academia (and journalism) is fundamentally the refuge of the stochastophobe tawker? That is, the voyeur who wants to watch but not take risks? It appears so. The most important chapter of the book, and conveniently the last one, "The Logic of Risk Taking," shows how some central elements of risks, while obvious to practitioners, can be missed by theoreticians for more than two centuries!
When to use it
When choosing a business mentor, consider experience running a company alongside the person’s ability to explain and teach.
Learning about leadership by studying historical leaders instead of reading management books.
When learning a skill, prioritize practice over reading about it.
Evaluating sources of advice: ask whether the advisor has personal skin in the game.
FROM THEORY TO EVERYDAY LIFE
In practice
Reading Montaigne vs. Reading a Textbook on Stoicism
Taleb recommends Montaigne as a writer whose practical experience informs his reflections. The example illustrates his preference for commentators who have faced consequential choices themselves.
The Classicist Who Never Acts
A professor may know Alexander the Great’s campaigns in detail without having faced comparable risks. Taleb uses this contrast to distinguish knowledge about courage from the experience of acting courageously.
A MOMENT TO REFLECT
Put it to work.
How can you ensure you are learning from those who have actual experience rather than just theory?
In what areas of your life are you relying on intermediaries rather than original sources?
Think of a topic you study—are you learning from doers or from commentators?
Often confused with
CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION
Source texts
- Skin In The Game Hidden Asymmetries In Daily Life (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)