What this leaves out is Taleb's advice from the book -- to pick a non-scalable career that is guaranteed to pay a high wage. His reasoning is that scalable careers are at the mercy of Black Swans. The vast majority of rewards are distributed to the lucky few at the top. This is not due to any remarkable talent, but luck and the nature of scalable success (it builds upon itself). If you hope to become an author who sells a million copies of a book, you will almost certainly wind up never selling more than a few thousand, while the guy at the top who is no more talented sells millions upon millions.