Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the bestselling author of
The Black Swan and one of the foremost thinkers of our time, reveals how
to thrive in an uncertain world.
Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension,
and rumors or riots intensify when someone tries to repress them, many
things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil.
What Taleb has identified and calls “antifragile” is that category of things that not only gain from chaos but need it in order to survive and flourish.
In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly improbable and
unpredictable events underlie almost everything about our world. In Antifragile, Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary, and proposes that things be built in an antifragile manner. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better.
Furthermore, the antifragile is immune to
prediction errors and protected from adverse events. Why is the
city-state better than the nation-state, why is debt bad for you, and
why is what we call “efficient” not efficient at all? Why do government
responses and social policies protect the strong and hurt the weak? Why
should you write your resignation letter before even starting on the
job? How did the sinking of the Titanic save lives? The book spans
innovation by trial and error, life decisions, politics, urban planning,
war, personal finance, economic systems, and medicine. And throughout,
in addition to the street wisdom of Fat Tony of Brooklyn, the voices and
recipes of ancient wisdom, from Roman, Greek, Semitic, and medieval
sources, are loud and clear.
Antifragile is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world.