Book Summary: Antifragile
Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book Antifragile discusses the ways that some systems benefit from, or even require, volatility and unpredictability. Antifragile examines why this is, what we can learn from it and how to be more aware of these principles at work in our own lives.
Related Book Summaries:
Mindset – Carol Dweck – Book Summary
Quotes:
Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.
Difficulty is what wakes up genius.
Book Summary Notes:
- Fragile items break under stress, antifragile items actually get stronger.
- Everyone knows what fragile is and means but what do you call the reverse?
- Evolution is an example of an antifragile system. It benefits and grows better because of the shocks and volatility it is exposed to.
- A system itself may be antifragile, often it is comprised of fragile individual parts. Evolution again is antifragile, we humans however are very fragile.
- Exercise has an antifragile response on our bodies, as we exercise we stress and shock our bodies, which in turn grow stronger as a response. Our bodies primary method of growing stronger is through the concept of overcompensation. This strengthening process increases our ability to deal with stress and shocks in the future by building excess capacity.
- Most man made items are fragile as they cannot change in response to stressors. Some artificial systems do in fact benefit from stress and shocks these include: the stock market and the economy as a whole.
- To become antifragile you must become great at managing risk. Cap your downside wherever possible.
- Typically the larger an organism or entity the harder it is hit by unexpected crises.
- Remember that our desire to eliminate volatility from our lives will eventually make us more fragile.
- We often undervalue the usefulness of volatility on our culture. Without it we may never have seen some of our biggest leaps forward like the industrial revolution.
