Anti-Resume

One of my favorite non-fiction writers is Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Everyone should read his "Fooled by Randomness".

I was reading the second edition of his "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" (note: this is not related to the recent Natalie Portman film). In it, he points out that it is far more important to deal with what we do not know than to focus on what we do know. He writes about writer Umberto Eco, who has a huge personal library and categorizes people by how they react to it. The majority focus on how many of the books he has read, and the (tiny) minority of wiser ones who..

"get the point that that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool... We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order. So this tendency to offend Echo's library sensibility by focusing on the known is a human bias that extends to our mental operations. People don't walk around with anti-resumes telling you what they have not studied or experienced..."

This really got me thinking about how to become smarter. Perhaps I could benefit from building an anti-resume for myself. List out all the important stuff I'm ignorant (unlearned) or innocent (inexperienced) of and prioritize changing that according to what I hope will have the greatest impact on my brain-power.

So work on my anti-resume begins this week. I'll post one soon.