Not Sure What the Future Holds? No Problem. It's hard not to be worried about the future, especially if you just lost your job, are trying to plan your career, or are suddenly missing thousands of dollars from your retirement account. In Optionality, finance journalist Richard Meadows lays out a guide for not only becoming resilient to shocks, but positioning yourself to profit from an unpredictable world. Meadows takes us on a journey from quitting his office job at age 25, to lounging on tropical beaches living the early retirement dream, to finding and adopting an ancient philosophy for systematically pursuing the good life. Learn how to: • Find investment opportunities with open-ended upside, and maximise the chances of a 'moonshot' success • Make life-changing choices under conditions of uncertainty • Achieve the kind of financial freedom that lets you live life on your own terms • Protect against disaster, build support networks, and create a safety buffer of resilience in every area of life • Develop a systems approach to making your own luck Optionality is the key to navigating an uncertain world. In this entertaining and insightful debut, Meadows delivers a timely message: optionality has never been so valuable, and only those who have it will survive and thrive.

Antifragile is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, Skin in the Game, and The Bed of Procrustes. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the bestselling author of The Black Swan and one of the foremost thinkers of our time, reveals how to thrive in an uncertain world. Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, and rumors or riots intensify when someone tries to repress them, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls “antifragile” is that category of things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish. In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. In Antifragile, Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary, and proposes that things be built in an antifragile manner. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better. Furthermore, the antifragile is immune to prediction errors and protected from adverse events. Why is the city-state better than the nation-state, why is debt bad for you, and why is what we call “efficient” not efficient at all? Why do government responses and social policies protect the strong and hurt the weak? Why should you write your resignation letter before even starting on the job? How did the sinking of the Titanic save lives? The book spans innovation by trial and error, life decisions, politics, urban planning, war, personal finance, economic systems, and medicine. And throughout, in addition to the street wisdom of Fat Tony of Brooklyn, the voices and recipes of ancient wisdom, from Roman, Greek, Semitic, and medieval sources, are loud and clear. Antifragile is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world. Erudite, witty, and iconoclastic, Taleb’s message is revolutionary: The antifragile, and only the antifragile, will make it. Praise for Antifragile “Ambitious and thought-provoking . . . highly entertaining.”—The Economist “A bold book explaining how and why we should embrace uncertainty, randomness, and error . . . It may just change our lives.”—Newsweek

The authors present current work on language acquisition which further investigates several themes developed by White's research.

Recent years have seen a growing interest in grammatical variation, a core explanandum of grammatical theory. The present volume explores questions that are fundamental to this line of research: First, the question of whether variation can always and completely be explained by intra- or extra-linguistic predictors, or whether there is a certain amount of unpredictable – or ‘free’ – grammatical variation. Second, the question of what implications the (in-)existence of free variation would hold for our theoretical models and the empirical study of grammar. The volume provides the first dedicated book-length treatment of this long-standing topic. Following an introductory chapter by the editors, it contains ten case studies on potentially free variation in morphology and syntax drawn from Germanic, Romance, Uralic and Mayan.

Capture the fortune you're losing with every trade by learning to exploit options The Options Edge + Free Trial shows you how to capture the fortune you lose out on every day. Buying and selling traditional investments often entails instruments with optionality. Sometimes this optionality is explicit, while other times it is hidden. If you're not leveraging these embedded options to their fullest advantage, you're losing money. Most retail investors don't truly understand the nuances involved in successful options trading and instead rely on more comfortable instruments with fewer complex mechanics. If you're interested in optimizing your portfolio, it's time to step out of your comfort zone and learn what you've been missing. This book gives you the background you need to take full advantage of options in this booming market. The companion website features easy to use analytical tools that help investors find the best opportunities so you can start applying these methods right away. Whether or not you ultimately decide to start actively trading options, the concepts discussed will make you a better all-around trader with greater security in your financial affairs. Most investors buy and sell options every day without ever knowing it. This book relates stories of those who have leveraged options to make fortunes and those who have lost by not understanding the optionality of their financial endeavors. You must know the fundamentals of options, and then learn to recognize hidden options, in order to improve success in all of your investment activities. After taking these steps, you can go on to: Create hidden options at little or no cost Structure your finances to reduce risk and increase wealth Utilize a practical pricing model for smarter investing The listed options are currently the only growing exchange traded financial product in the developed markets, with a current average volume of 20 million contracts—equivalent to 2 billion shares—per day. Now is the perfect opportunity to fortify your finances, and The Options Edge + Free Trial gives you the understanding and practical tools you need to optimize your portfolio today.

In this business bestseller, how companies can adapt in an era of continuous disruption: a guide to responding to such acute crises as COVID-19. Gold Medalist in Business Disruption/Reinvention. When COVID-19 hit, businesses had to respond almost instantaneously--shifting employees to remote work, repairing broken supply chains, keeping pace with dramatically fluctuating customer demand. They were forced to adapt to a confluence of multiple disruptions inextricably linked to a longer-term, ongoing digital disruption. This book shows that companies that use disruption as an opportunity for innovation emerge from it stronger. Companies that merely attempt to "weather the storm" until things go back to normal (or the next normal), on the other hand, miss an opportunity to thrive. The authors, all experts on business and technology strategy, show that transformation is not a one-and-done event, but a continuous process of adapting to a volatile and uncertain environment. Drawing on five years of research into digital disruption--including a series of interviews with business leaders conducted during the COVID-19 crisis--they offer a framework for understanding disruption and tools for navigating it. They outline the leadership traits, business principles, technological infrastructure, and organizational building blocks essential for adapting to disruption, with examples from real-world organizations. Technology, they remind readers, is not an end in itself, but enables the capabilities essential for surviving an uncertain future: nimbleness, scalability, stability, and optionality.

"Indispensable reading for anyone seeking to improve their professional selves." —Daniel H. Pink, #1 New York Times bestselling author of When An essential guide for how to snap out of autopilot and become your own best advocate, with candid anecdotes and easy-to-adopt steps, from veteran HR specialist and popular podcast host Laurie Ruettimann Chances are you've spent the past few months cooped up inside, buried under a relentless news cycle and work that never seems to switch off. Millions of us worldwide are overworked, exhausted, and trying our hardest—yet not getting the recognition we deserve. It’s time for a fix. Top career coach and HR consultant Laurie Ruettimann knows firsthand that work can get a hell of a lot better. A decade ago, Ruettimann was uninspired, blaming others and herself for the unhappiness she felt. Until she had an epiphany: if she wanted a fulfilling existence, she couldn’t sit around and wait for change. She had to be her own leader. She had to truly take ahold of life—the good, the bad, and the downright ugly—in order to transform her future. Today, as businesses prioritize their bottom line over employee satisfaction and workers become increasingly isolated, the need to safeguard your well-being is crucial. And though this sounds intimidating, it’s easier to do than you think. Through tactical advice on how to approach work in a smart and healthy manner, which includes knowing when to sign off for the day, doubling down on our capacity to learn, fixing those finances, and beating impostor syndrome once and for all, Ruettimann lays out the framework necessary to champion your interests and create a life you actually enjoy. Packed with advice and stories of others who regained control of their lives, Betting on You is a game-changing must-read for how to radically improve your day-to-day, working more effectively and enthusiastically starting now.