In this profound and playful book, Nassim Nicholas Taleb presents his ideas about life in the form of aphorisms, the world's earliest - and most memorable - literary form. Procrustes was a character from Greek mythology who abducted travellers and invited them to spend the night in a special bed, which they had to fit to perfection. They never did. Those who were too tall had their legs chopped off; those who were too short were stretched. Every aphorism here is about a Procrustean bed of sorts - we humans, facing the limits of our knowledge, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies and pre-packaged narratives. Only by embracing the unexpected - and accepting what we don't know - can we see the world as it really is.

納西姆•尼古拉斯•塔勒布，絕大多數時候都是一名漫遊者，在地球各個角落的咖啡廳裏冥想。他早年曾經從商，目前是紐約大學特聘教授。曾在紐約和倫敦交易多種衍生性金融商品，也曾在芝加哥當過營業廳的獨立交易員。2001年2月正式成為衍生性金融商品交易戰略名人堂的一員。他的作品包括《隨機緻富的傻瓜》和《黑天鵝》，後者曾連續一年多列位《紐約時報》暢銷書榜，以31種語言齣版，是一本知識、社會和文化方麵的經典著作。