Become Antifragile: turn stress into growth

Becoming anti-fragile, a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, is the best way to grow and thrive under stressful circumstances. It’s the quality that allows us to turn stress into growth.

And in this video, we’re going to learn the three qualities that make a person anti-fragile, two practices to help achieve those qualities, and the difference between being anti-fragile, robust, and fragile. A fragile person is one that is negatively affected by stress. If they encounter a traffic jam on the way to the grocery store, their whole day is ruined. They’re upset and can’t get over it, and they take that anger out on the cashier.

A robust person is one that isn’t affected by stress. If they encounter a traffic jam on the way to the grocery store, they’ll simply breathe in, breathe out, and get over it. It doesn’t have an effect on the rest of their day. They just go about things as normal. But an anti-fragile person is one that is positively affected by stress—up to a point of course. No one is anti-fragile to every kind of stress.

But when the anti-fragile person encounters the traffic jam, they use it as an opportunity to learn and grow. Maybe they look for an alternative route, so that they can avoid getting stuck in traffic again. And finding a new and better way to get to the grocery store actually makes them happy for the rest of the day. They even share their newfound knowledge with their family, benefitting everyone. They turn lemons into lemonade, stress into opportunities.

And so by becoming an anti-fragile person, we improve our ability to learn and grow under stressful conditions. To become anti-fragile, a person needs three qualities. The first quality of an anti-fragile person: they face the possibility of failure. Overprotection leads to fragility. Parents who protect their kids too much, never letting them fail, never letting them take on any responsibility, always bailing them out of any trouble, end up making them fragile.

Those kids easily become overwhelmed and unable to handle even the smallest amounts of stress, because they were never given the chance to fail and grow more competent as a result of those failures. The second quality of an anti-fragile person: they’re protected from irreversible harm in the event of failure. An anti-fragile person needs to be able to recover from their failures. Parents who allow their kids to take smart risks, while sheltering them from unreasonable or dangerous ones, allow their kids to become more anti-fragile.

Their kids need to be allowed to fail, but they need to be able to recover from those failures. The third quality of an anti-fragile person: they learn from their failures. A kid who takes smart risks and learns from their mistakes is anti-fragile. They use their failures to grow stronger and mature, and as a result, they become better able to thrive in stressful situations.

So an anti-fragile person has three qualities: they face the possibility of failure, they’re protected from the irreversible harm of failure, and they learn from failure. A bodybuilder is a great example of someone who has all three qualities. By trying to lift a heavy weight, he faces the possibility of failure. But by placing a reasonable amount of weight on a barbell and doing a reasonable amount of reps, he protects himself from the irreversible harm of failure that might come from lifting a weight that is too heavy.

And by protecting himself from irreversible harm, if he does fail to lift the weight for the desired number of reps, he learns from it and adjusts his approach so that he can lift it the next time. Achieving the three qualities of an anti-fragile system is easier when we apply what Taleb calls a “barbell technique”. Generally speaking, the barbell technique combines hyper-conservative activities with risky ones to protect us from irreversible harm in the event of a failure, while allowing us to benefit from the upsides of taking smart risks.

An example of the barbell technique is someone who works a really stable day job and does something relatively risky in the evenings, like making YouTube videos or investing in stocks. The stable day job protects them from going bankrupt if their YouTube channel or investments were to completely fail. And by protecting themselves from bankruptcy, they actually give themselves the space and time to learn from their mistakes.

By learning from their mistakes, they learn to make better videos and investments, which will hopefully result in a big pay-off when they eventually succeed. So by using the barbell method, by combining a stable day job with a risky passion-job, they protect themselves from the downsides of failing, while still allowing themselves to reap enormous benefits when they succeed at taking smart risks, such as when their YouTube channel or investments blow up and make money.

Here’s another example. This is obviously not financial advice, but if someone invested 95% of their cash in hyper-conservative assets and the other 5% in risky but rewarding ones, that would be a barbell approach. The hyper-conservative investments protect them from the harm caused by failing in the risky investments.

And again, by protecting themselves from irreversible harm, they give themselves the chance to learn from their failures and improve their investing knowledge. And by improving their investing knowledge, they can hopefully win big at some point from their riskier investments. The barbell approach allows them to put themselves in a position to take smart risks and learn from their failures, to minimize the downside of failure and maximize the upside of success from taking smart risks.

The barbell technique, combining hyper-conservative activities with risky ones, works by giving a person the three qualities required to make them anti-fragile: the possibility of failure, protection from the irreversible harm of failure, and the ability to learn from failure. And a truly anti-fragile person learns from their failures. They transform their failures into lessons by using their failures as evidence against their own beliefs.

For example, I start with a hypothesis: if I publish a video that is instructive, full of persuasive arguments and tips, it will get at least 100,000 views. Now when I publish this video—the one on anti-fragility—we’ll see if that hypothesis is true or not. If this video fails to succeed, I can transform this failure into a lesson.

I can use this failure as evidence against my initial hypothesis that a persuasive and instructive video essay would do at least 100,000 views. I can use my failure to disprove my hypothesis wrong. And by realizing which of my hypotheses are wrong or untrue, I can let them go and discover new ones that are more true.

When we know with certainty what is wrong, we can move closer to discovering what’s right. We can transform present failure into future success. The importance of this can’t be overstated. When we destroy our false beliefs, only the truest beliefs survive and reproduce.

And by keeping only the truest beliefs, the ones we can’t disprove, the better our knowledge gets across time. And the better our knowledge gets across time, the better we get at surviving and thriving, especially under stressful circumstances. Disproving our own beliefs is like weightlifting for the mind, and it makes us adopt the three qualities of an anti-fragile system.

First, it subjects us to failure. By trying to disprove our own beliefs, we’ll eventually find how what we thought was true is actually false. In other words, we’ll discover a failure in our past thinking. Second, by voluntarily confronting our errors on our own terms, we make sure that this failure won’t result in irreversible harm.

Voluntarily teaching ourselves a lesson is a lot safer than having reality force that teaching on us by surprise. Learning how to detect when a bear is in the area while you are ready for it is safer than having to figure out by surprise—when you are not ready for it. And lastly, by detecting our own errors, we overcome them, which is learning.

If you’re interested in learning more about anti-fragility, I highly recommend reading Nassim Taleb’s series of books titled Incerto, in which one of the books is specifically about anti-fragility. There’s way more to the concept than I’ve even explored in this video. I’ve also recommended his Incerto several times on this channel, and they’re ones I end up returning to every year.

But in short, becoming anti-fragile requires taking smart risks—risks that can’t cause irreversible harm—and learning from our mistakes. And two good ways to become anti-fragile are to use a barbell technique and transform our failures into lessons by using our failures as evidence against our beliefs.

By eliminating false beliefs, we move closer to true ones, and by holding truer beliefs, we’re better able to survive and thrive in stressful circumstances. With that said, good luck!