It’s one thing to live and another to live your life in a way that is antifragile.
Author Nassim Taleb says defines the term antifragile this way:
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 antifragile. Antifragility is 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: evolution, culture, ideas, revolutions, political systems, technological innovation, cultural and economic success, corporate survival, good recipes (say, chicken soup or steak tartare with a drop of cognac), the rise of cities, cultures, legal systems, equatorial forests, bacterial resistance … even our own existence as a species on this planet.
Things that are antifragile benefit from randomness, uncertainty, and variation.
Now that we have this knowledge, what should we do with it?
Life is messy and seemingly getting messier. Can we position ourselves to gain from this disorder … to not only recover from mistakes but get stronger?
The answer is yes. There are principles we can follow to help us.
Buster Benson has some excellent thoughts on how to live an antifragile life, giving us these core principles taken from the Antifragile book: