Black swan

Lets talk about this animal: black swan. Have you seen one? I have, once. In Perth. Swan river became the habitat of black swan—one of Western Australia’s tourism object. It became attractive because commonly, we know swan for its white feather. Most people don’t anticipate the existance of swan with nonwhite feather.

On his book entitled The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb use the phrase to explain one phenomena in terms of management. In this video, The Swedish Investor made a good summary. They associate it with how turkey bird facing thanksgiving.

Firstly, they thought that humans are so kind that they fed turkey bird everyday. Even more, humans built fence to keep them save. Unbeknownst, thanksgiving day has coming. The turkey became dinner menu.

That’s the point of what Nassim Taleb called The Black Swan problem. Need another example? Earlier this year, Indonesian government gave a financial stimulus towards tourism industry. By being so, Jokowi’s cabinet hoped that foreign tourist would became easily came to Indonesia.

Unfortunately, they didn’t realize that the calling to foreign tourist could also spread the new kind of coronavirus, the SARS CoV-2 as we know it today. Subsequently, we realize that The Black Swan problem could be defined as a risk that we only know when it has been happened.

The same situation appeared as it described on the film of Black Swan. This 2010 produced movie, tells about how obsession of perfection triggered a halucination in one ballet dancer. This dancer named Nina Sayers, wanted to be appointed as a main dancer on the story of Swan Lake.

Swan Lake itself, was actually a ballet composition created by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in 1876. Black Swan was an interpretation of Swan Lake. Almost all music scoring in this film, came from Tchaikovsky’s composition.

Meanwhile, the ballet performance tells about a girl who gets turned into a swan, and she needs love to break the spell. Sadly, her prince falls for the wrong girl. At the end of the story, she kills herself.

The plot in Black Swan, focused on Nina’s obsession to get perfection on the stage. Both as a white swan and as the black one. Through the film, we can see how she got depressed and hallucinated. Even so, at the end of her performance, she got a great appreciation.

“Perfect. I was perfect.” Nina whispered as she closed her performance. []