The antifragile mindset: how to become more antifragile

What is antifragility?

Antifragility is a term coined by Nassim Taleb in his 2012 book, “Antifragile.” It denotes what benefits from problems, usage, variation, and feedback.

What does it mean to be antifragile?

To be antifragile means to be able to benefit from problems, usage, variation, and feedback.

The ability to resist problems isn’t enough to be antifragile – that would be robustness. Instead, antifragility requires not just merely resisting but also benefiting.

Hence strategies such as diversification, while good for becoming more resistant to downturns (if properly implemented), aren’t sufficient for antifragility if they aren’t also implemented in a way that allows capturing upsides.

How to become antifragile?

Wrong question: as living beings, we are already antifragile to some extent. There are already some problems and activities that make us stronger.

The right question is, “how to become more antifragile?” 

In other words, how to benefit from a larger quantity of problems and activities and be fragile to fewer of them?

The answer is very complex, and I answer more extensively in my book on ergodicity and in my Antifragile Organizations course, but here are some tips to start with.

• First, reduce your fragility. Don’t take excessive risks that can spell game over. Ensure you have more than you need on an average day (e.g., have more cash than you usually need, be healthier than you usually need, have stronger relationships than you usually need) so that you can survive sudden problems.
• Second, expose yourself to small problems and stressors through training or proactively looking for feedback and small problems you did not care about.
• Third, be more reactive to feedback. This doesn’t mean accepting every piece of feedback (some are wrong, misleading, or not worth your time), but it means listening to every piece of feedback and evaluating whether it points out something worth addressing (instead of defaulting to avoidance or defensiveness). Something that can help with this is to redirect any piece of feedback that’s about yourself to a behavior or belief of yours – so that instead of feeling criticized, you evaluate whether one of your “components” should change.
• Fourth, expose yourself to low-downside high-upside situations. Some activities, relationships, and investments satisfy this condition, but not all do. Find out those that do and try to invest a bit in them.

Luca Dellanna helps organizations grow their revenue by becoming more antifragile and through better people management. If you are interested in his services, you can contact him here.