MICHEL PIREU: Hard work, a little intelligence and a lot of risk-taking, or luck?
When you look at anything — say the stock market — you see the survivors, the winners; you don’t see the losers and you will be likely to mis-attribute the things that led to winning," says Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, in a piece on Edge.org. "There is a silly book called A Millionaire Next Door, and one of the authors wrote an even sillier book called The Millionaire’s Mind. They interviewed a bunch of millionaires to figure out how these people got rich. Visibly they came up with a bunch of traits," says Taleb. "You need a little bit of intelligence, a lot of hard work and a lot of risk taking. And they derived that, hey, taking risk is good for you if you want to become a millionaire. "What these people forgot to do is to go take a look at the less visible cemetery — bankrupt people, failures, people who went out of business — and look at their traits. "They would have discovered that some of the same traits are shared by these people, like hard work and risk taking. T...
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