In the The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Taleb points out an anecdote about the writer Umberto Eco. According to Taleb, Eco owns a very large and impressive personal library of about thirty thousand books and his visitors split into two main categories: the ones who say "Wow, Signore professore, how many of these books have you read?"; and the others who understand the library not as an ego-boosting vitrine but as a research tool. Taleb stresses that a library should contain as many things that you do not know as you can afford, and he calls this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

The main point is that we should focus more on what we do not know, something which seems to be contrary to what society tells us to do. As Taleb say, imagine someone running around with an anti-résumé telling what he does not know. In this sense, although mostly discouraged in everyday life, acknowledging and embracing the unknown is a crucial ingredient for any creative enterprise.

 Edit Post