Antifragile

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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About

Antifragile by Nassim Taleb is about the things in life that improve—and actually thrive—when subjected to stress, uncertainty, and disorder… Just like your muscles thrive and strengthen when they’re subjected to stressful situations, such as an intense weight-lifting session.

Just like scandals and rumors have a propensity to spread like wild-fire when people try to cover them up, or how riots and protests get even bigger when they’re repressed — there’s a wide category of other things in life that also benefit from this kind of chaos, disorder, and volatility. This category is what author Nassim Taleb refers to as the “antifragile.”

Antifragility is not the same as resilience—while resilience is about resisting stress while staying the same, antifragility is about resisting—and even welcoming—stress while getting better and better.

Here’s what you’ll learn about in this book summary:

• How volatility and uncertainty often tend to be the key ingredient of improvement.
• The difference between the “fragile” and the “antifragile.”
• How to leverage the concept of antifragility, so that you can benefit from stress, chaos, and unpredictability in your own life.

Crucial quote

”The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means—crucially—a love of errors, a certain class 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. Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility. I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.”

Summary-in-a-sentence

Antifragility is a term that describes things that grow, gain, and benefit from seemingly negative situations.

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BIG IDEAS

1. Fragile things break under stress, while antifragile things grow stronger and better.
2. An antifragile system always comprises of fragile constituent parts.
3. Antifragile systems gain new strength and build up extra capacity in the face of shocks and stressors.
4. Volatility is critical to antifragility. Tranquility leads to fragility.
5. You can benefit from antifragility simply by seizing the opportunity, with no need to understand the details.
6. The barbell strategy.
7. Unexpected crises affect larger systems more adversely than smaller ones.
8. Antifragile modern professions survive at the expense of everyone else.
9. The attempt to remove volatility and bring order to everything will inevitably create a more fragile society.
10. The ‘Turkey Problem’ – modern society’s flawed attempts to predict the future by reading the past.
11. Our society consistently fails to understand how antifragility fuels social and scientific progress.

1. Fragile things break under stress, while antifragile things grow stronger and better.

Fragile objects need to be handled with extraordinary care. Imagine a situation where you have to pack a wooden item and another where you have to pack an item made of glass. Given the fragile nature of glass, you would take a lot of extra care in packing it securely, right?

In a nutshell, you could say that a fragile thing needs to be guarded against any volatile situations. However, is it possible that there may be things which actually benefit from volatile circumstances? This can be sort of a tricky question — after all, how could anything actually benefit from disorder and deliberate unpredictability?

Going back to the aforementioned analogy, how do we define something that gets better from being handled roughly, as opposed to the careful handling of fragile glass? Interestingly, Taleb tells us that most of the world’s languages have no term to describe things that gain from disorder. So, he decided to coin his own term, thus the advent of the word, “antifragile.” 

A classic example of the concept of antifragility can be found in the mythical Greek creature, Hydra.

In Greek mythology, Hydra was portrayed as a serpent with countless heads. Every time someone cut off one head, two more sprang up in its place, making the creature virtually invincible. So in a way, Hydra profited from chaos and volatility rather than being harmed by it, and therefore we’d refer to it as antifragile.

Like Hydra, there are many things which prefer—and in fact, require—stress, resistance, chaos and even temporary failure in order to grow…

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