Don't stop at Resilience, aim for Anti-Fragility

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019/20, I mostly saw people use the word resilience while deep down I was hoping that at least a few would look at the world from the lens of anti-fragility.

Those who already read the book Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb need no introduction to the concept but for started I am quoting below what anti-fragility means and how is it different from resilience.

“Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it anti-fragile. Anti-fragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the anti-fragile gets better.”

I got to know the concept of antifragile several years back but of late I find its relevance even more. And the reason I get switched off every time I hear 'resilience' is that it feels to me that the moment we aim to be resilient we give up on a great opportunity to be anti-fragile.

When we aspire to show resilience we subconsciously acknowledge our ego that we know the future because we are saying we don't need to learn as we move into the future.

We also tend to accept our mediocrity by becoming intellectually lazy and not do the work required to shape the future.

I don't want you to get me wrong. I like to be resilient and it isn't totally wrong but if we wish for greater things we should not get limited by the comfort resilience provides to us. We must go beyond resilience and aim for anti-fragility.

As a property, anti-fragility can be applied in multiple spheres of our life and can be a great lens to look at various aspects that are inherently antifragile already.

As Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes in his book, our human curiosity is antifragile. The more we are forced to suppress it, the bigger and stronger it gets.

“Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction, and is magnified by attempts to satisfy it — books have a secret mission and ability to multiply, as everyone who has wall-to-wall bookshelves knows well.”

There is a reason why people who are into lifelong learning appear to be humble because they know that they don't know a lot and any amount of pride in having learnt something will only come in their way of learning more things.

Some of the most interesting resources I stumbled upon in the last few days:

• The emotional side of empowering & inspiring others by Gianpiero Petriglieri
• Reinventing oneself, a case study from sports
• Competitive advantage through People

And a few LinkedIn posts I wrote recently:

• Internal dialogue vs. External narrative
• Judgement to continue or walk away
• Reasons to invest in our learning
• Anti-Fragile India

Check out?all the previous editions of this newsletter here .