Becoming Antifragile

Hi, I’m David and my mission in life is to prepare people for the future of work.?

In this week’s edition of the newsletter the theme revolves around becoming antifragile. How is it that some people come back from crushing defeats while others simply give in? Why does adversity make some people and teams stronger and render others ineffective? Can we position ourselves to not only recover from mistakes but get stronger? The answer is yes! There are principles we can follow to help us live our life in a way that is antifragile – a way in which we are not only better positioned to face adversity, but thrive from it. That’s because things that are antifragile benefit from randomness, uncertainty, and variation. Below are some insights and thoughts that will help you understand what it means to be antifragile.

Timeless Insight

“How can you think yourself a great man, when the first accident that comes along can wipe you out completely.” – Euripides

Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and uncertainty. Author Nassim Taleb describes such things as being antifragile. The classic example of something antifragile is Hydra, the Greek mythological creature that has numerous heads. When one is cut off, two grow back in its place. Antifragility goes beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. This property is behind everything that has changed with time: culture, political systems, technological innovation, economic success, the rise of cities, bacterial resistance, even our own evolution as a species on this planet. The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means a love of errors. Antifragility has a singular property of allowing us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them, and do them well. We’re largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. The modern world may increase technical knowledge (see the latest developments in AI), but it will also make things more fragile. Antifragility makes us understand fragility better. That’s because it is far easier to figure out if something is fragile than to predict the occurrence of an event that may harm it. Fragility can be measured; risk is not measurable. Thus, by grasping the mechanisms of antifragility we can build a systematic and broad guide to non-predictive decision-making under uncertainty in business, politics, medicine, and life.?

Food for Thought

You get ‘pseudo-order’ when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness and work towards becoming antifragile.?

In every domain or area of application, we propose rules for moving from the fragile towards the antifragile, through reduction of fragility or harnessing antifragility. And we can almost always detect antifragility (as well as fragility) using a simple test of asymmetry: anything that has more upside than downside from random events is antifragile; the reverse is fragile.

Crucially, if antifragility is the property of all those natural (and complex) systems that have survived, depriving these systems of volatility, randomness, and stressors will harm them. They will weaken, die, or blow up. We have been fragilizing the economy, education, healthcare, and almost everything in-between, by suppressing randomness and volatility. Much of our modern, structured, world has been harming us with top-down policies and contraptions which weaken the antifragility of our systems. This is the tragedy of modernity: as with overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.

According to Nassim Taleb, author of Antifragile, antifragility is the antidote to black swans, which hijack our brains, making us feel we sort of or almost predicted them, because they are retrospectively explainable. We don’t realise the role of these black swans in life because of this illusion of predictability. Life is a lot more complex than we can comprehend, yet our minds are busy turning history into something smooth and linear, which makes us underestimate randomness. But when we do encounter it, we fear it and tend to overreact. Because of this fear and thirst for order, we tend to be exposed to harm from black swans.

Man-made complex systems tend to develop runaway chains of reactions that decrease, even eliminate, predictability and cause outsized events. So the modern world may be increasing in technological knowledge, but it is making things a lot more unpredictable. Fragile and antifragile are relative, there is no absolute. You may be more antifragile than your neighbour, but that doesn’t make you antifragile. Often it’s impossible to be antifragile, but falling short of that you should strive to be robust. And, how do you become robust? Make sure you’re not fragile. Eliminate things that make you fragile. Here are some ideas:

“You have to avoid debt because debt makes the system more fragile. You have to increase redundancies in some spaces. You have to avoid optimisation. I have always been very sceptical of any form of optimisation. In the black swan world, optimisation is not possible. The best you can achieve is a reduction in fragility and greater robustness.” – Nassim Taleb

If you haven’t already, I highly encourage you to read Nassim Taleb’s best-selling book, Antifragile. Buster Benson also has some excellent points on how to live an antifragile life:

• Look for principles that stood the test of time;
• Stick to simple habits;
• Take lots of small risks;
• Avoid risks that, if lost, would wipe you out completely.

Article of the Week?

Developing Personal Resilience and Becoming Antifragile

Caricature of the Week

Source: Condé Nast

Thank you for reading and keep on growing!

David

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