The key ideas

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 2012

Why might a clerk's steady salary be more dangerous than a taxi driver's jumpy income? Nassim Taleb shows that some things break under shocks, others withstand them, and others grow from them. You'll learn how to tell the fragile from the antifragile, why too much help does harm, and how to set up your life so that disorder works for you.

Who it is for

For anyone tired of fearing change who wants their work, money and plans not to collapse at the first blow. And for anyone who suspects that stability can be deceptive.

Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them.

The candle and the fire

Blow on a candle and it goes out. Blow on a fire and it burns brighter. The wind is the same, the outcome is the opposite. This is the image Nassim Nicholas Taleb opens the book with: randomness, uncertainty and chaos are like the wind. The question is not how to hide from them, but what you are to them: the candle or the fire.

Taleb spent twenty years trading in financial markets and then started writing about risk. In The Black Swan he showed that the most important events can't be predicted. Antifragile came out in 2012 and answers the next question: if predicting is useless, how should we live?

His answer: stop guessing about the future and look at how your life, your work or your company is built. Some things break under shocks. Others withstand them. And others grow and get stronger from them. The language had no word for this third kind, so Taleb invented one.

Twelve chapters lie ahead. In them you'll meet two brothers from London, an ancient philosopher with olive presses, surgeons, bankers and a Roman Stoic. By the end you'll be able to look at your own life and see where it is fragile and where it can gain from disorder.

A parcel marked "Please mishandle"

When glasses are sent by mail, the box says: "Fragile, handle with care." Taleb asks us to imagine a parcel with the opposite label: "Please mishandle." Inside is something that won't just survive the shaking but will come out better. That is antifragility: gaining from shocks and disorder.

To show the difference, Taleb borrows three images from ancient myths. Over Damocles at a feast hung a sword on a single horsehair. One jolt, and it's over. That is fragility. The Phoenix burns and is reborn from its ashes just as it was. That is robustness: the blow does no harm, but it does no good either. And then there is the Hydra: where one head is cut off, two grow back. Every wound makes it stronger.

The main mistake, according to Taleb, is that we treat robustness as the best we can hope for. We want nothing to break, and we spend our energy guarding against every jolt. But the robust at best stays where it is. Everything alive, from muscles to languages to economies, works differently: within limits, it needs blows in order to develop.

So Taleb suggests asking one question about anything: what happens to it if the world gets more turbulent? If it suffers, it is fragile. If it gains, it is antifragile.

Read in Livria

About the author

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Lebanese-American writer, a former trader and risk researcher, and the author of The Black Swan. He teaches risk engineering at New York University.

All books by this author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Terms from the book

  • John
  • George
  • Phoenix
  • Aristotle
  • Hormesis
  • Rubin
  • option
  • Asymmetry
  • Lindy
  • Seneca
  • antifragility
  • Citigroup
  • Volatility
  • Damocles: A figure from an ancient Greek tale: a courtier over whom a sword was hung by a single horsehair at a feast. For Taleb, the symbol of fragility.
  • Hydra: A monster from Greek myth that grew two heads in place of each one cut off. For Taleb, the symbol of antifragility.
  • Mithridates: Mithridates VI Eupator, king of Pontus, a state on the Black Sea coast, in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC. Legend says he took small doses of poison to get used to them.
  • Mithridatization: Building tolerance to a poison through small doses. Named after King Mithridates.
  • Overcompensation: A response of a body or a system to a blow that goes beyond what recovery requires, with something to spare.
  • Touristification: Taleb's word for the attempt to remove all randomness from life and make it as predictable as a scheduled tour.
  • Cantons: The self-governing regions of Switzerland. The country has 26 of them.
  • Iatrogenics: Harm caused by the treatment itself. Taleb extends the idea to any intervention.
  • Tonsils: Clusters of lymphoid tissue in the throat. In the first half of the 20th century they were removed from children very often.
  • Fat Tony: A fictional character in Taleb's books, a street-smart trader from Brooklyn who looks for what is fragile and bets against it.
  • Thales: Thales of Miletus, an ancient Greek thinker of the 6th century BC, considered one of the first philosophers.
  • Siegel: Joe Siegel, a lumber trader. Taleb took his story from Jim Paul's book about trading.
  • Stoic: A follower of Stoicism, an ancient philosophy that taught people to calmly accept what does not depend on them.
  • Via negativa: Latin for "the negative way". For Taleb, the strategy of improving life by removing what harms rather than adding something new.
  • Neomania: Taleb's word for the craving for everything new simply because it is new.

All terms

Similar books