I’ve been reading Taleb’s Skin in the Game these past few days. The book primarily explores the concept of asymmetric risk—the central idea being that if there’s any chance of total ruin, you shouldn’t touch it no matter how great the potential gains. Repeatedly exposing yourself to risk, however small the probability, will eventually destroy you.
But what truly lingers with me is his moral insight and call to action: Be entrepreneurs. Courage is the highest virtue, and the essence of courage is taking on risk—sacrificing your own well-being for the sake of something greater than yourself. This suddenly connected a whole series of scattered thoughts I’d been having lately.
The Existential Problem
Existentialism teaches us to engage with life. But what does that actually mean? As someone who’s never believed in hedonism, I’ve never gotten the appeal of beach vacations. Or those little everyday pleasures? They don’t ignite my passion either. Looking back, what I’ve truly enjoyed has always been non-material.
Taleb’s “skin in the game” suddenly hit me. Always doing things that carry no risk—like endlessly thinking and running simulations in my head—gradually made me lose touch with reality, eventually trapping me in a nihilistic void about existence and meaning.
Practice Over Theory
We often think knowledge is invented by university scholars, but it’s actually craftsmen and practitioners who develop it through hands-on practice. The answers to life and the formation of self-identity work the same way.
Universality is grand in books but disastrous in practice. Kant’s moral metaphysics—both the principle of universality and treating people as ends—is excellent, and I would never say it’s wrong. But in practice, it’s extremely difficult to apply. Kant’s principles typically require second-order or higher abstraction, yet 95% of people don’t even possess the capacity for second-order thinking—they simply cannot grasp abstractions even one level higher. Systems that work well tend to be more localized, like Anglo-American common law compared to continental legal systems. These systems aren’t so much designed as experimented into being.
I once considered an academic path, but always felt fundamentally at odds with academia. The experiments and hypotheses didn’t seem to contain the answers I was seeking. So hearing Taleb talk about skin in the game resonated deeply with me. This is the path we need to take, and it’s at the heart of the existential problem that’s been troubling me lately.
Soul in the Game
Safe imagination and simulation purely in your head can’t produce any meaningful answers. We need skin in the game. Even more so, we need soul in the game.
Investing your life’s time and energy in what matters most to you—things whose loss you’d deeply regret and whose attainment would bring genuine joy—that’s the path to breaking through nihilism.
We need entrepreneurs.
Creation Over Destruction
A while back, when I wasn’t focusing on work, I reread the Vagabond manga. Then I saw a comment on Reddit that hit home:
Killing is so easy, yet bringing forth even a thread of life is so difficult; destruction happens in an instant, but creation is long and arduous.
Those simple moral commandments usually oversimplify everything—right and wrong, black and white. To understand the true meaning of morality, we need the capacity to understand complex systems and find pathways that actually work.
Why bother with thankless tasks? Maybe because I find life boring and think about death every day—if I don’t do something mentally demanding, I simply can’t go on living. Maybe it’s about aesthetics. Should we live in accordance with nature or against it? Drifting along and enjoying the moment versus diligence and discipline—people choose both, and the key is finding beauty and tranquility in whichever you choose. Some things just feel too cheap to me.
In my understanding, what entrepreneurs create isn’t just concrete things—human connection is equally part of it.
The Courage to Build
I rarely see forgiveness in Chinese people—another rare quality is integrity. Friendships fall apart at the drop of a hat but rarely mend. It’s so easy for people to hate each other, but loving others requires courage, patience, and skill.
To fight atomization, to fight nihilism, what we desperately need is cohesion. If you only know how to destroy but can’t build something better, you’ll never truly convince anyone. I’m not against criticism, but stopping at that level is just too cheap.
Skin in the game also means not wasting resources and energy on things you don’t truly want. I’ve been quite confused and lost lately, feeling empty about everything, unsure what I want next. But this book reminded me that there are still things that can ignite our passion, things that lift us up.
Going forward, I should put my soul in such games.