Picking Up Girls and the Game of Asymmetric Returns

I’ve been relistening to Nassim Taleb’s wonderful book Fooled by Randomness, which is a probabalist’s dream read. And if there’s one thing that picking up girls turns you into, it’s a probabalist.

Reading it (or listening to it on audio, as I am), you see a great many parallels between stock trading and seduction. And you also come to understand why some men succeed at picking up lots of different pretty girls, and why most men never will.

In many things in life, but especially in trading and in pickup, there is what you’d call an asymmetric distribution of returns. And that means that by participating in trading for stocks or picking up girls or anything else with an asymmetric distribution, you’re opening yourself up to asymmetric returns.

But the mind does not take well naturally to asymmetric returns. It doesn’t grasp them. It isn’t built to work that way.

And the result of this is, an endless abundance of great returns for those few souls willing to go against the grain, fight the emotions that go with it, and chase down their asymmetric returns in spite of their struggling and fearful or frustrated brains... and an endless source of frustration and disappointment for the majority of souls who just go with the flow.