Becoming Anti-Fragile: Utilising the Power of Mistakes to Grow Stronger

“Pour more gasoline on the fire, fly again, rising through the flames.?Don't?underestimate?the path I've walked; with my song I'll build my future. I'll climb higher, to the top of the world I itched for. No biggie if I were to fall. I'm anti-fragile. All I know is you can't chain me, 'cause I’m gonna break out. Toss away your fairytale, now you know my name, I’m anti-fragile.” ?????

These are the declarations boldly sang by South Korean girl group, Le Sserafim, in their breakout hit, Anti-fragile. With lyrics perfectly encapsulating the incredibly powerful essence of anti-fragility, and what it means to thrive despite one’s mistakes, but because of them. How can we learn from the message of this song, and all become more anti-fragile?

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. This is the heart of the psychological principle of anti-fragility coined by mathematician Nassim Taleb. It refers to systems that get stronger when they experience disruption and disorder. Our immune system for instance, must face challenges in order to learn, and our muscles, too, have to be tested in order to grow stronger. ?

Anti-fragile people don’t just endure unexpected shock or disruption, but rather they benefit from it. In Greek mythology terms, anti-fragile people are like the hydra. When the hydra is attacked and gets a head chopped off, it grows two heads back in its place. So, how can we adapt to this hydra mentality? How can we become anti-fragile?

The first step lies in reframing our perception of mistakes. We all have the tendency to look back upon our setbacks, failures, and mistakes with shame, but what if we could turn our mistakes into something that we can harness for positive change? Rather than viewing mistakes as something intrinsically negative, we should instead be viewing them as opportunities for growth and learning, as a way to become stronger and gain new knowledge.

“Life’s beauty is inseparable from its fragility.” Explains psychologist Susan David. “So, it is vital that as human beings, we develop our capacity to deal with our thoughts, emotions, mistakes and failures in a way that isn’t a struggle, but in a way that embraces them and in a way in which we can learn from them.”

However, it is not only mistakes we must learn to deal with, but also the disruptions and unexpected setbacks the world throws at us, whether it be in our personal or professional lives. Whilst we cannot control how these things happen around us, the one thing we do have the power to control is how we react to such occurrences. “I do not think that things necessarily happen for the best.” Says psychology educator and author, Tal Ben-Shahar. “However, we can learn to make the best of things that happen.” ?

Writer and criminal justice activist, Shaka Senghor believes that “If you acknowledge what you are going through and you recognize that it is an obstacle, that it is a dark moment, but also realise that there’s light on the other side of the tunnel, then you can get through. I think hope is the cornerstone of resilience.” He explains. “If I focus on the purpose, instead of the pain, then I can get through to the other side.”

On the path to becoming more resilient and realizing our own anti-fragility, Senghor goes on to describe the importance of “Being resourceful and figuring out in your environment the things that you can utilize to help you cope with whatever it is you’re going through.” ?

?“I have found a lot of the time we replay memories that no longer exist over and over in our head.” He continues. “And what that does is, it holds you hostage. And so, once you begin to release those memories and recognize that you can never reclaim that space, or time, or experience, then you can move forward in life, because now you have taken the shackles off. In order to be resilient, you have to not be thinking about what happened in the past, you just have to be focused on what you need to do to move forward.” ?

From Senghor’s words we can learn the power of letting go and no longer dwelling on our past, and the mistakes we may have made, but instead focusing on moving forward, towards the future and towards possibility. ?

“In order to hone and strengthen our resilience muscles, we must take that first step into the fear itself, into the unknown, into the uncertainty that all of us have within ourselves.” Says Nancy Koehn, Historian at Harvard Business School. “You have the ability to take one small step into that. And it becomes accretive. It’s about the mileage of moving into our fear with just a tiny step. Moving into it and then getting more access to your inner strength and resilience. It doesn’t come from on high, but we can discover it within ourselves.” ??

Building our resilience and becoming anti-fragile is not about blind positivity, or aiming for a fairytale, but about accepting the reality of what you are going through. It is about acknowledging ?the mistakes you have made and learning how to grow from them.

It is likely no coincidence that the album artwork for Le Sserafim’s Anti-fragile features kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with powdered gold. Kintsugi itself stands as a shining metaphor for accepting one’s flaws, imperfections, mistakes, and setbacks, and becoming even stronger because of these things.

How can we unchain ourselves and break free of the belief that mistakes are inherently bad? What can we do to change the narrative around mistakes and setbacks, and being to see them as the golden opportunities for growth that they really are? ??????

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Written by Katie Wilson, EP Business in Hospitality