The Quick Start Guide to Antifragility

Note: We cannot recommend highly enough Nassim Taleb’s books; Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, Antifragile, and Skin in the Game. As a reader we’ll assume you’re someone who wants to take these insights and apply them for a simpler, smarter life.

The ‘2nd order’ lens

Here’s how to start: with your life as a whole. We’ll get into checklists for money, business, health, and so on. But the place to start is life as a whole. Technically, we’ll call each specific domain of your life (like, ‘health’ or ‘personal finance’) ‘1st order’. When you put a bunch of 1st order things together you get a ‘2nd order’ perspective.

The difference really matters for antifragility. Let’s recap the concepts in order to clarify why 1st or 2nd order perspectives matter at the outset:

‘Fragile’ - something which is harmed by uncertainty, change, risk, and chaos. How fragile something is is determined by the acceleration of harm. So, a china vase is ‘fragile’ since, if you knock it over (change; chaos) it will break. The more it gets knocked, the more certainly it will break (acceleration of harm).

‘Robust’ - something which is unharmed and unchanged by uncertainty, change, risk, and chaos. Example: a steel box.

‘Antifragile’ - something which is benefited by uncertainty, change, risk, and chaos. How antifragile something is is determined by the acceleration of harm. Example: weight training, within certain parameters; challenge your body’s strength and you’ll find you get stronger. The greater the challenge, the greater the strength response (within parameters; the principle at this point is simply to clarify that there is a dynamic adaptation which is positive, in response to pain).

So this resource is all about giving you the tools to win from uncertainty and challenge in all areas of life, and to be able to be so fluent with the principles of antifragility that you can write your own checklists as needed.

Now let’s return to 1st and 2nd order; you can be antifragile within a given domain, yet, fragile on the 2nd order. Let’s say that you are making great progress in your deadlift, or your 5k run time, but your financial life is so fragile that one day you’re forced to stop your gym membership because of financial hardship. Or, your finances are great and your investments are growing year on year, but then you drop dead from a heart attack. Or find you have no one close to you to enjoy your wealth with. The point is, at the end of the day, 2nd order antifragility is the only kind that counts.

And that’s why we start with the quick start guide for 2nd order antifragility – for your life as a whole:

The quick start guide involves learning just 4 principles, and then reflecting on them across your life and activities.

Margin. The fastest way to get more antifragile is to focus on margin, also called ‘redundancy’, or ‘spare capacity’. This is both defensive and aggressive. You may know the saying, ‘if you have one, you have none; if you have two, you have one.’ In the real world, life has a way of destroying plans and intentions. Instead, those with the best back ups – and the most back ups, - win on a long enough time frame. So, focus on margin as the quick start. It feels boring until all of a sudden it gives you a tremendous breakthrough. The more spare cash, spare time, spare energy, spare emotional energy, spare network, spare ideas, etc you have, the better you’ll absorb surprises and be able to pounce on opportunities.

Curiosity, playfulness, adventure, risk. Whatever word you choose to use, an attitude in life which is open to possibilities – through adventure, playfulness, and curiosity, is the simplest way to win in surprising ways as time goes on. The crucial thing to see is that when ruinous risk is taken care of (and we’ll cover strategies for this – but the simplest one is ‘build margin’), playing and being curious will lead to more and more as time goes on.

Integrity/no regrets. This is how antifragility informs the ethics and morality of your life. Rather than puzzle over ‘what’s the right thing to do in this situation’, ask ‘what will I not regret in years to come’? This means situations and choices cannot continue to hurt and harm us. In a sense, you reap compound interest on all the worry and hassle you don’t have, from choosing to act in a way which you won’t ever regret. Basically this leads us to profound integrity in all our relationships and dealings with people. No regrets is the pathway to a pure and simple inner world as time goes on.

Execution. It’s all about execution, specifically execution in the downturns. For instance:

• When investing, what, specifically, do you do when you’re losing money? Because anyone can make money when the market goes up.
• In health and physical training, what, specifically, do you do when you’re not making progress, or when you’re even declining? Because anyone can make initial progress with pretty much any training program.
• In relationships, what, specifically, do you do in the face of conflict or mistrust? Because anyone thinks they’ve got a great quality of relationship until an issue crops up.
• In parenting, what, specifically, do you do in the face of challenging behaviour? Because anyone finds parenting easy when their children are being angels.
• In entrepreneurship, what, specifically, do you do when you aren’t making sales? Because anyone can enjoy the warm fuzzy feelings of hype and promise.
• In leadership, what, specifically, do you do when you face criticism or even betrayal? Because anyone can enjoy people’s goodwill for a while.

Do you see? Really, antifragility is all about execution on the downsides. The upsides will generally take care of themselves – though there are, as we’ll see, ways to maximise the wins from upsides.

Seeing as this is the quick start guide, the absolute core of good execution in a downside is ‘make things simpler’.

We will dig into these meta-principles in the coming articles. For now, here’s the quick start in life overall:

1. Build margin
2. Embrace curiosity, adventure, and playfulness
3. Use the ‘no regrets’ principle of duty
4. It’s all about how you execute in the downturns; make things simpler.

Next steps? Coming soon.