THE BED OF PROCRUSTES by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

International bestselling author of The Black Swan (named one of the 12 most influential books since WW2 in The Times) is a guru of counterintuitive wisdom.

The world's most iconoclastic thinker gives us his words of wisdom in brilliant bite-sized form.

Set to achieve the success of The Secret by Rhonda Byrne and Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet

This pithy, provocative guide to life, love, luck, hate and happiness will take him far beyond his core business readership

'Smart ,attention – getting..intense..happily provocative' the New York Times

' Great fun….brash, stubborn, entertaining , opinionated, curious , cajoling' Stephen J Dubner (Author of Freakonomics)

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.

About the Author
Nassim Nicholas Taleb spends most of his time as a flâneur, meditating in cafés across the planet. A former trader, he is currently Distinguished Professor at New York University's Polytechnic Institute. His books Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan have been published in thirty-one languages.