Reposting an old review of the essential China Shakes the World by James Kynge.
nassim nicholas taleb, the improbable best selling author of the black swan believes that success is illusionary (at times it seems he believes everything is illusionary – it’s all random, all luck!). his main thesis is that luck is often behind what we normally perceive to be success and that humans are hard-wired to under-estimate the role that randomness plays via various biases.