The Black Swan is not an economics textbook. These are the thoughts of a very extraordinary person about life and how to find your place in it. Over the last decade alone, humanity has experienced a number of severe shocks: September 11, 2001, the war in Ossetia, the global financial crisis. All these events, which seem natural to us now, seemed absolutely impossible until they happened. Forty-nine-year-old Lebanese, Sorbonne graduate and New York financial guru Nassim Taleb calls such unpredictable events Black Swans. He is convinced that it is they who give impetus to both history as a whole and the existence of each individual person. And to succeed, you need to know how to handle them. Immediately after the publication of this book, the author brilliantly demonstrated his “non-theory” in practice: against the backdrop of the financial crisis, Taleb’s company earned (not lost!) half a billion dollars for investors. From the main heretic of Wall Street, who single-handedly opposed the legion of futurists and analysts, Nassim Taleb has emerged as a figure whose influence extends far beyond the financial world.