‘In point of fact made me take into consideration how I think’ – Mohsin Hamid, creator of Exit West
Tough times don’t last. Tough people do.
In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly unbelievable and unpredictable events underlie almost the whole thing about our world. Here Taleb stands uncertainty on its head, making it desirable, even necessary. The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better.
Just as human bones get stronger when subjected to stress and tension, many things in life get pleasure from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil. What Taleb has identified and calls antifragile are things that not only gain from chaos but need it to be able to live on and flourish.
Antifragile is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world. Erudite, witty, and iconoclastic, Taleb’s message is revolutionary: the antifragile, and only the antifragile, will make it.
‘The freshest thinker on the planet’ Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times